Pre-Jetsons Science Fiction Comedy of Dan DeCarlo’s Jetta, at Auction

Posted in: Comics, Heritage Sponsored, Vintage Paper | Tagged: Dan DeCarlo, Jetta, Standard/Better/Nedor

A decade before The Jetsons, Dan DeCarlo’s Jetta was a science fiction comedy about normal life in the far future we were promised.

There is surprisingly little discussion out there about the science and science fiction that influenced seminal 1962-1963 Hanna-Barbera Productions cartoon The Jetsons.  A decade ago, Smithsonian Magazine had a wonderfully detailed series discussing many specifics that seem to have influenced various details of the show.  There’s also an assertion that the 1962 book 1975: And the Changes to Come was an influence, though the cold, stark visuals of that book leave me feeling that it was only a broad influence at best. The Yowp Hanna-Barbera blog contains some incredible detail on the series.  But it might just be that the ultimate influences for The Jetsons are many, and sometimes obvious.  Certainly, one can point to a legion of pulp and magazine stories and illustrations where such ideas had been seen before.  Even so, it’s almost impossible to look at the short-lived 1952-1953 Standard/Better/Nedor comic book series Jetta without thinking about how much it looks and feels like The Jetsons, right down to the title.

Cartoonist turned pulp writer Joe Archibald is credited with the scripts for the Jetta stories.  Archibald had been a newspaper cartoonist in the 1920s, and also has credits in some of the most historically important comic books of the early Golden Age, such as Dell’s 1929 The Funnies #1, and 1935’s New Fun #1 from the company that would become DC Comics.  He would enter the pulp writing field in the early 1930s, with his best known science fiction coming in the 1950s with a series starring a character called Septimus Spink in the title Fantastic Universe.  He did work on a number of comic book titles in the Standard/Better/Nedor line in the early 1950s.

Of course, Ned Pines’ Standard/Better/Nedor empire was one of the standard bearers of science fiction across both comics and pulps during the 1940s and early 1950s, after having acquired the Hugo Gernsback title Wonder Stories (renamed Thrilling Wonder Stories) in 1936.  Captain Future was one of the best-known and perhaps most influential of the Pines science fiction properties in that era, with the comic book version initially being drawn (and perhaps written) by artist/writer Kin Platt.

Platt would spend most of his comic book career at Standard/Better/Nedor, and though his last known credit there is from two years before the debut of Jetta, it is still notable that he would go on to help create The Jetsons and write for other Hanna-Barbera series including The Flintstones and Jonny Quest.

The Standard/Better/Nedor Startling Comics title, where the comic book version of Captain Future debuted, has become legendary in recent years for its later-era connection to another science fiction cartoon with an apparent influence on Futurama’s Bender.  Captain Future, styled as “The Man of Tomorrow” in both the pulp and comic book versions, had deep connections to another seminal moment in mainstream pop culture science fiction — the 1939 New York World’s Fair and its Futurama exhibit’s “World of Tomorrow.”

Best remembered for a style that came to define the look of Archie Comics by the end of the 1950s, Dan DeCarlo spent much of that decade working on a number of Marvel titles, most notably Millie the Model and My Friend Irma.  The prolific artist also did work for a few other publishers during the 1950s, including Ziff-Davis and Standard/Better/Nedor.  His pretty, funny, charming artwork proved to be a good match for Jetta.

An incredibly underappreciated and possibly influential short-lived series, there are two issues of the short-lived Jetta of the 21st Century up for auction in the 2024 June 16-18 Sunday, Monday & Tuesday Comic Books Select Auction #122425.

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