the head of the National Newspaper Service, which syndicated comics and features, read Nowlan's novella, sought out Nowlan to produce a syndicated column in strip form, "A story in strip form of conditions in America some five hundred years hence." The comic strip character was named Buck Rogers, and artist Dick Calkins was hired to do the illustrations. The story of the comic strip diverges from the novel after the first few strips and never returns to it. While Armageddon 2419 A.D. heavily emphasizes war, military tactics and technology, the Buck Rogers comic strip is based on adventures and romantic problems. The book features lethal violence and gore, while the comic strip does not. The entire "occupied America" theme of the original book was tacitly dropped, and the United States in which the comic strip Buck Rogers lives seems a direct continuation of the present-day one, which had not undergone centuries of Han occupation. While it sometimes claimed that they introduced the idea of "personal flight" with the use of devices attached to the body, this idea is based on the fact that a flying man is depicted on the cover of the August 1928 issue of Amazing Stories, which included the first part of Armageddon 2419 A.D. In fact the cover illustrates E. E. Smith's serial The Skylark of Space, which began in the same issue. Edgar Rice Burroughs' The Moon Maid saga has some similarities to Armageddon 2419 A.D., in which American "tribes" rebel against Moon people who have previously conquered the world. In the 1980s the original Armageddon 2419 A.D. was taken up again and authorized sequels to it were written by other authors working from an outline co-written by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle and loosely tied-in with their bestseller Lucifer's Hammer (1977). The first sequel begins c. 2476 A.D., when a widowed and cantankerous 86-year-old Anthony Rogers is mysteriously rejuvenated during a resurgence of the presumed-extinct Han, now called the Pr'lan. The novels include: Mordred by John Eric Holmes (Ace, January 1981, ) Warrior's Blood by Richard S. McEnroe (Ace, January 1981, ) Warrior's World by Richard S. McEnroe (Ace, October 1981, ) Rogers' Rangers by John Silbersack (Ace, August 1983, ) See also Buck Rogers: A Life in the Future, a 1995 novel by Martin Caidin that reimagines the events of Armageddon 2419 A.D. Invasion literature References External links 1928 American novels 1928 science