A Little Argument

Friday Comic Book Day.

Here has been a discussion going on on Facebook between two publishers of old comics. Both of them use material from the copyright free domain to make collections. One of them only chooses the best, presents the material in the best possible way and has the most prestigious scholars comment on them. The other one has no problem showing unpopular artists, shows the material as it was and stresses the outragousness of many of the stories he is reprinting. Can you guess who I am with? Yes, it's the second one. Not only because the first one (Fantagraphics started the attack - and it really was a hatched job) and the second one (Craig Yoe) has never counterattacked, and even published a list of the best Fantagraphics book he knew. Not even because I have worked with Craig on Behaving Madly and can never get a Fantagraphic's attention. The real reason is that I find collecting comics from the fifties both a joy and silly. There was a lot of crap made in that period (as in any period) and I have been running my blog to celebrate that. I do not believe in dividing the comics world into the worthy and the not worthy. As I have proven here time and again there is good and bad to be found in most artists. There is excellence in some artist who just hacked away at it and there are some who worked really hard and still didn't manage to find their groove. I don't believe in publishing only the established big names, reprinting the EC books for the umpteenth time and adding scholarly commentary that only rehashes what we already know to justify the importance of my hobby.

Lately I have been looking at a couple of Stan Lee produced Timely/Atlas books from the early fifties and like the first time I became interested in them I was blown away completely again. Only two books, Adventures into Weird Worlds #13 and #21, two issues I had not seen before. And I know, there is very little in there that reaches the level of excellence that the EC books do. But they are also imbued with a sense of fun that Al Feldstein and his creators only rarely reached. Over the next few days I hope to show some of those stories and maybe add a little nonscholarly commentary by myself.

Adventures into Weird Worlds was one of the many horror titles that were launched in the early fifties to cash in on the current rage for that sort of material. What happened in comics was that the soldiers that read the comics in the forties were looking for the next step up and the rougher, more adult material provided that (in the horror books, but also in the new, grimmer war titles). The first story is a story with a twist, like the ones Stan Lee liked to write himself. In fact, there are a couple more indications it might have been one of his. There is the use of 'thru' instead of 'through', which he always did (even in his private correspondence with syndicates). There is the use of four dialogueless panels in a row with commentary on top (which he may have gotten from Harvey Kurtzman at EC). There is the fact that the story concerns classical monsters, which Stan always liked and used and reused an many ways, the fact that it has a twist ending - many of Stan's stories start out a a 'joke'. And it has seven pages, which is one page more than normal - a bonus he only afforded himself over all the other writers. There are indications it may not be his as well. First of all, Stan used to write in bunches on his day off or at the weekend. That means that all of his stories fall into a set of sequential job numbers - most of them ending or starting with one of his funny teen books (My Friend Irma and such) which he had to do one a week anyway. The added horror or war story usually was a little something extra, maybe because something occurred to him while writing the other assignments. Sadly, the job numbers surrounding this one (B-346) are not signed by Stan and are not likely to have been written by him either. So I is more likely to have been brought in by another writer. And lastly he did not sign this story, where he did sign most of his work. On the plus side, this story is drawn by Carmine Infantino, one of the top talents he liked to use for his own stories.

Carmine Infantino did not sign his work either, but there was only one artist doing this sort of detailed and often grotesque work at Timely and that was Infantino. If you go to the Atlas Tales website and look up this book, you will see a bunch of us agreed on that attribution, at least. As for the Stan Lee attribution... I don't think it is his. Another complication is the fact that the monster introduced in this story was used again in Adventures into Weird Worlds #15, is another unsigned story drawn by George Tuska. And again, there are no Stan Lee written stories surrounding that job number (B-781). It also has 'thru', it has the row of textless panels, seven pages and a twist ending. But two unsigned ones as a solo effort? Very unlikely.

In that case, there is only one other writer who shares some of these characteristics with Stan, and that is Hank Chapman. Only problem is that he too usually signed his work and that he had left the horror field (famously, because they gave him nightmares) and had started writing war stories for Stan - and lots of them.

So here is the first one. I will do the second one tomorrow. Presented as is, and none of them will convince the art world that comics from the fifties were a noble endeavour. But for those of us who love reading, they are very well produced, they do not have the text heavy style that pulled down the EC books and both George Tuska and Carmine Infantino are two of the greats of the industry whose work in the fifties is unjustly forgotten. They also present another view of what was happening in comics in the fifties than the black and white EC versus the rest of the world view presents. I will go into that in one of my next posts about these fascinating books.

Calling All Fans

Friday Comic Book Day.

I have said it before and I will say it again. Marvel and DC are sitting on treasure troves of comic book art from the forties and sixties. In this period most books were of the anthology style, each containing many shorter stories. In the forties, this meant that many new heroes could be tried out - a great deal of which have survived over the decades. In the late forties and fifties, when hero comics made way for genre books, whole issues were filled with stories about characters which could not be picked up in later books (the occasional Groot notwithstanding). In many cases these stories represent the best artwork of certain artist. Our view of their career is colored by what is reprinted and not by what they drew. Artists such as Gene Colan, George Tuska, Joe Sinnott, Dick Ayers, Don Heck, Paul Reinman, Bob Powell and many, many others are often misrepresented in books about their work, just because not everyone has every comic ever published and those from Marvel and DC have the extra problem of being worth a lot of money - especially if there happens to be a very collectable superhero story in the same book (something that especially counts for the late forties DC books). Of course these companies have tried their own reprint series, but both tried to rely on the know to sell the unknonw. In DC's case, this meant that most of their reprint books were character based, collectingall of Wonder Woman from her various comics, but none of the seperate stories by artists such as Carmine Infantino, Irwin Hasen or Bernie Krigstein from the same books. Marvel tried to reprint whole books or lines, but that meant they had to choose series that have a few duds as possible. Neither have tried doing it the Craig Yoe way, the whose IDW imprint Yoe Books has books that are selected either by aris, by genre or by sunject. Now that all reprint series from Marvel and DC have been cancelled I suggest they open their library to Craig and have him do his type of books for them. Horror collections with only the best stories by the best artists, overview books of the careers of Gene Colan or Russ Heath or Carmine Infantino or even Henry Boltinoff or subject related books, such as a reprint of historical stories from Marvel's war books from the fifties. So that we can have more of this:

Super Detective

Saturday Leftover Day.

After the succes of the Batman television series, the newspaper strip that had been cancelled in 1946 was tried again. And like the television series, it was a pretty sorry affair. The strip ran on Sunday from 1966 to 1969 and daily from 1966 to 1974. At first is was as camp as the television series, with appreances by celebrities like Jack Benny. The Sundays were ghosted by Shelly Moldoff for the first half year and taken over by DC house inker Joe Giella in 1967 and Al Plastino in 1968. Somewhere in there, Carmine Infantino gave a hand as well and although he was no longer officially there, I see his hand in some of these 1967 strips. But that could be Joe Giella stealing Infantino's poses as well.

Bruce Canyon, Flying Ace

Friday Comic Book Day.

Here is my new favorite Jack Kirby strip. Link The Flying Fool was created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby when they came to Hillman after their first postwar series at Harvey failed. The first one appeared in May 1947. As some people have pointed uot, this series looks as if it was inspired by Milton Caniff's Steve Canyon, which did not appear in newspapers until january 1947. Caniff had worked on the strip in secret for a year. If you take into account the fact that comic were predated by a couple of months and that the whole thing had to be written, drawn and printed, that gives Simo and Kirby a very short time to have produced it. On the other hand, former Caniff assistant Ray Bailey had been doing a strip of his own that was very similar to the later Canyon, called Bruce Gentry. Although I don't think that it is likely that The Flying Fool was based on Gentry, I do think that the so-called secrecy around Canyon may have been overstated. Or maybe Simon and Kirby were capable of producing such a pretty strip in a manner of weeks.

Because pretty it is. It lacks the visual choas of many of their previous work and it is still all Simon and Kirby (where so much of their studio work later became a mishmash of styles). I think you see more traces of the later Jack Kirby here than in many places. Of course, some art spotters have seen other hands in these stories as well, but there are many visuals and concepts here that we would see later.

Th last story is not by Simon and Kirby, who left Hillman pretty soon after arriving there, because they got a better deal at Prize Comics and ere able to do their own books there. Their first effort, a new romance comic, became an industry changer on it's own. The story here may be by Carmine Infantino and Bernard Sachs. Infantino followed Simon and Kirby to Prize soon after and began working in a style that was very similar to Kirby's for a while.