The Easy Way

Sunday Al Williamson Surprise. 

Due to a busy week it took me a little bit longer to get to this post. It's another solid western story by Willamson and Stan Lee. The story is simple enough (when were they anything else) but the art is pretty good and it's a nice reversal of tradition cliché's. WE are now entering the period of TImely/Atals where the coloring had become so simple that it hurts the eyes. In the later days of EC, flat color was often used to direct the eye away from certain areas - wether it was a foreground that needed to be set apart from a background, or a horific explosion that needed to be de-emphasized. But in stories like this (and it certainly wssn't the only one) the flat colors are used willy-nilly, just to have the coloring take less time, less seperation, less whatever. I don't say it needs the modern multi-dimensional computer coloring - but I would to see see this colored the way newspaper Sunday comics were colored in the forties and fifties.

 

Excelsior!

Saturday Leftover Day.

I have shown most of these Sundays before in various forms, but never this complete. 

In January 1951 Stan Lee (and signed) wrote three episodes for Chad Grothkopf's Sunday only comic strip version of the popular children's television puppet series Howdy Doody. The series had started earlier in 1950 and the writing was co-credited to Milt Neil, a former Disney animator, who had perfected the design of the Howdy Doody puppet. Some writers assume that Neil was also the writer of the strip, although that abillity is in none of his other credits. The style of the strip is totally that of Grothkopf. Anyway, his name disappeared from the strip in early December (though most papers were slow in adjusting it on the top). All of the following December jokes are simple enough to have been thought of by Grothkopf himself.

According to several sources he asked his friend Stan Lee (whom he had work for at Timely and who had written one of the episodes of his earlier newspaper Sunday only strip Famous Fiction, Under The Flag anonymously) to write some episodes for him. They appeared in January 1951 and all three of them were signed.  They are also typically Stan Lee gags, with the same bad puns he was using for the comic series My Friend Irma he did with Dan DeCarlo. In his storyline, he introduced a kid version of the Featherman character that was introduced in the tv show as an adult indian chief (very much in the manner of that time).

Here you can see the run-up to that moment in The Commercial Appeal. They added the strip in November 1950, starting with the first strip which had first been made for much earlier that year. But as you can see it has no date, but rather 'number 1'. After that there are some single visual gags, probably written by Grothkopf himself. Then the usual holiday greetings and then the start of the Featherman story.

Featherman is now a little indian kid, who lives in an indian reservation and gets introduced at Howdy Doody's school. At the end of the gag, there is a figure in a large hat peeking in the classroom and the text is added: "Who's the mystery man at the window?" The next week we see it seems to be an adult indian, but we don't get to know yet what he wants from Howdy and/or Featherman. In the third episode the mystery man is knocked out at a barber's shop and we are told his identity will be revealed in the next week.

That next week is no longer signed by Stan Lee, but I think it was written by him, too. First of all, the whole sequence leads up to the reveal. Secondly, the same type of misunderstanding puns are used. Thirdly, when the mysterious 'indian' is finally revealed he turns out to be Spencer Spout, the Talent Scout - who seems to be a caricature of Stan himself. The long face, the premature balding head... and his hucksterlike attitude, when he says he is a talent scout, who wants to take Featherman to Holywood.

The story goes on for another eight episodes. Featherman (and his new friends, of course) go to Holywood, where is discovered and becomes so famous that he has to return home to escape the fans. I don't think that Stan Lee wrote the whole story. Although it does follow his style of continued narrative with gags along the way, the gags themselves usually are not in his style. The episode of February 14 is anybody's guess. The gag "Can I take your bag - No, go find-um your own!" is something Stan would write and the sarcastic joke "Let's do something different - I know, let's do a cowboy movie!" could be his as well. But then he would have started (and possibly done) the rest of the storyline as well and I don't think he did.

Anyway, now you can see for yourself.  As I said, I showed many of these before, but never this complete. But some of the others were in color, some were the full half page and some were both. If you want to see those, just follow the link.

I am also selling two of the Stan Lee Sundays and some more on Ebay right now. Get them while they are hot.

 

The First Supervillian

Sunday Al Williamson Surprise. Signed Al Williamson, this we we have a short story from Journey Into Mystery #43 that has everything you want from a Williamson story... except maybe the inks. When Williamson returned to Marvel in the eighties and nineties, he showed himself to be the master of finishes. He introduced tenchniques for shading that other have since incorporated. Sometimes you see some of those techniques in his earlier work. Such as the way he uses ben-day dots to do the inage outside the window, or later the diagonal 'hay' he uses to draw a tree. But some of the other inking defentively looks non Williamson and in fact Jim Vadeboncoeur Jr. estimates on Atlastales.com that the inking might be by Ralph Mayo. If so, they either worked together really well or Williamson did some of this stuff himself. There are a few hints that this story may have been written by Stan Lee. The job number comes in a row of Lee written (and signed) western stories and ir does use the word 'thru' instead of 'through', as Stan always did.

 

I Krenkel Do What You Krenkel Do

Sunday Al Williamson Surprise. 

For today's Al Williamson story for Timely (stick around, I am doing all of them), he either got some help from Roy Krenkel r he decided to show he could do it without Roy as well.

 

Surprise! No surprise!

Sunday Not Al Williamson Surprise

This week I take small sidestep to show an Angelo Torres story from the same period as the Willamson work I am showing these months. As you can see, there is very little to tell them apart, apart from the storytelling (Williamson is much more showy and posterlike and uses more open panels) and (sometimes) the thin pen lines.

 

Friends Again?

Sunday Al Williamson Day. 

After last week's dubious Williamson story, this wee we are back with on ehe definitively did, maybe even inked himself. He may have help, I haven't worked out a system. But I am keeping this up till the last story Williamson did, so who knows what we'll find out.

 

Let's Not Do That Twist Again

Sunday Al Williamson Surprise. Another great instalment, probably inked by Williamson as well. An pretty sttraightforward story, where the twist is that therre is no twist.

Nothing To Fear

Sunday Williamson Day. 

Another western story that may have been comepletely done by Williamson. Stan Lee what Williamson could do and that it didn't matter how slight or moralistic his stories were. The shading and spotting of blacks is examplerary.

 

The Truth Will Come Out

Sunday Williamson Surprise.

 Another classic western with lots of Williamsonisms. But what makes this special is, that it is the only story I have ever seen that was signed by Stan Lee and uses the word 'through" written als 'through' and not 'thru'. And not only the only story, the only everything he wrote. A few years ago I wrote two articles on Stan's writing for Alter Ego. For that I have read thru all of his presuperhero stories, all of his newspaper work, all of his available correspondance with his agent Toni Mendez and everything else I could get my hands on - and he always uses 'thru'. In wester stories such as this he likes to use vernacilar and indeed al the 'yuhs' here confirrm that. But on the first panel of page three there is this caption using 'throughout', which I have never seen him use. I don't know what he used instead. Was it 'thruout'? Or 'thru-out'? Did he never use it? Or is 'throughout' simply the only way you can write it while remaining readable? Ah... the troubles of a comics archeologist.