Unusual Tales - The Moon Snatchers

"Unusual Tales", a series presenting Steve Ditko's comics from 1957 to 1959 that are in the public domain.

"The Moon Snatchers" is a 5-page story from Charlton's SPACE ADVENTURES #27 [1959]. For some reason this one is signed "Space Mann", and is right around the time that several stories and covers were signed either "J. Kotdi" or "J. Kodti". I have no idea if there's any significance to that.

Anyway, this story is set in the future where the moon is being used for both mining and dumping atomic wastes, and then an astronomer detects that it's moving away from Earth at a rapidly accelerating rate towards Venus and has to be evacuated, accidentally leaving one miner behind.  I was hoping the answer would be that the moon was running away due to the mining and atomic wastes, but it was much more pedestrian than that.

But before the story, some links:

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Download public domain comics, likely including the one this story is from

Scans in this series generally adapted to my personal tastes from those copies

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