Buck Rogers
Long before Star Trek and Star Wars, there was Buck Rogers, the first comic strip devoted to science fiction. Debuting early in 1929, it introduced readers to most of its stock features, including rocket ships, space travel, robots, and ray guns, concepts considered by most to be wildly improbable, if not downright impossible. A graduate of a pulp fiction magazine, Anthony "Buck" Rogers served as a sort of ambassador for the science fiction genre, presenting many of its premises, plots, and props to a mass audience. Indeed, it was Buck Rogers that inspired a wide range of people, from creators of comic book superheroes and future astronauts to scientists and Ray Bradbury. Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, as the strip was initially titled, helped introduce the United States to the possibilities of the future, such as space travel and the atomic bomb, while simultaneously offering quite a few wild and exciting adventures.
Buck Rogers was the creation of Philadelphia newspaperman Philip Francis Nowlan, who was forty when he sold his first science fiction story to Amazing Stories. Titled "Armageddon—2419 A.D.," it appeared in the August 1928, issue, and featured twenty-nine-yearold Anthony Rogers, who got himself trapped in a cave-in at anabandoned Pennsylvania coal mine.
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