Number 261

Happy Valowe'en!

All of this artificial sweetness about Valentine's Day. Ugh. I'm not against love, I'm against greeting card companies, candy manufacturers and florists telling me when to tell someone I love them.

I found these valentines a few years ago at a local thrift store. The Universal Monsters package is still in its plastic wrap. Now these are valentines that get the Pappy Seal Of Approval: alien abductions, medical experiments in space, anal probes…or the monster valentines: bites on the neck, werewolves ripping people limb from limb, monsters to trample someone and throw them down a well.

Now that says "I love you!" Pappy-style.

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Number 260

The Beast From Fifty Million, Trillion, etc…

Here's a funny story from Atlas' Crazy #2, 1954. The artwork is by Joe Maneely, a great cartoonist who seemed to work almost exclusively for Atlas before his accidental death. Maneely was reputedly one of the fastest artists in the business, able to draw six or seven pages a day. Considering how fast he was nothing in this strip looks rushed.

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On a personal note:

The news is that Steve Gerber died. I corresponded with Steve during the ditto'd fanzine days of the early '60s. We were both about 15 at the time. Steve did what I always wanted to do, make a living as a writer. I wouldn't have wanted to go through the ugliness of his fight with Marvel Comics over Howard the Duck, but I admired him for sticking up for his principles. I also enjoyed those first few issues of Howard, which seemed fresh to me at the time.

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Number 259

Happy birthday, Abe

Tomorrow is Abe Lincoln's birthday. We'll celebrate it by showing his death! Illustration Station has Jack Davis illustrations from the children's book, Meet Abraham Lincoln, so I thought I'd post some pages from the 100-page Dell Giant comic from 1958, Abraham Lincoln Life Story.

The one-shot biographical giant comic was probably an experiment that flopped. I never saw another of its type from Dell.

According to the Grand Comics Database it's written by Dell workhorse Gaylord DuBois, and drawn by Italian artist Alberto Giolitti. Giolitti used a lot of photo reference. It shows with his stagey panels, but I'm sure they were going for a narrative that didn't look like a comic book. That's obvious from the use of captions rather than speech balloons.

You all remember Giolitti from Turok, Son Of Stone and Star Trek. He died in 1993.

This is an excerpt of 8 pages from the end of the book, with panels that impressed me 50 years ago: Lincoln's premonition of his own death, and the attention to detail of the assassination.

Page 1 / Page 2 / Page 3 / Page 4 / Page 5 / Page 6 / Page 7 / Page 8

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Number 258

Herbie, Boy Beetle!

On Sunday, February 9, 1964, the Beatles made their initial appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. My whole family was there in front of our TV. My brother Rob and I knew what we were seeing, but our parents didn't. I could practically see the drop-shadowed question marks over their heads.

I enjoyed it when the Beatles popped up in comics, even though the people who produced the comics were of my parents' generation. Richard E. Hughes, under one his many pen-names, Shane O'Shea, wrote the story of mop-topped Eibreh Rekcenpop taking the pop world by storm. Artist Ogden Whitney did a fair job drawing the Beatles. Both Hughes and Whitney probably shrugged their shoulders and wondered what the Beatles' appeal was, but they knew the age of their readers and to sell comics were more than willing to put them into Herbie's strange little universe. They even threw in Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra, singers more appealing to their generation. Even an extrinsic view of the Beatles phenom was a sort of validation of my own Beatlemania, I guess. Though the Beatles--or "Beetles" as they are known here--are secondary to the story, I loved this when I first saw it in Herbie #5, Oct-Nov 1964. For those of us who remember the original British Invasion, when the Beatles conquered the known universe, it has all the more meaning.

Page 1 / Page 2 / Page 3 / Page 4 / Page 5 / Page 6 / Page 7 / Page 8 / Page 9 / Page 10

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Number 257

The Lovesick Clown

Rudy Palais does a "true" crime comics version of I Pagliacci in Crime Does Not Pay #43, January 1946. The clown gets turned down by the woman he lusts after, then goes into a murderous rage.

I empathize. Without killing anyone, at one time or another every guy has made a clown of himself over a woman. So many times for me I coulda gone to work for Ringling Brothers-Barnum and Bailey!

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Number 256

Underground comics

Here are variations on a theme: two stories about people who find utopian civilizations underground, with two different endings. "The Men In The Mole" was published in Atlas Comics' Journey Into Unknown Worlds #65, March 1957, and "The Spelunker" appeared in Atlas' Marvel Tales #141, December 1955.

"Mole" was illustrated by John Forte, and "Spelunker" by famous Mad-man, Mort Drucker.

The Men In The Mole

Page 1 / Page 2 / Page 3 / Page 4

The Spelunker

Page 1 / Page 2 / Page 3 / Page 4 / Page 5

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Number 255

The Thing On Sputnik 4

I bought Race For The Moon #2 in July, 1958. I loved all things science fiction, and thought this comic was neat-o, daddy-o! I didn't know Jack Kirby's name, but I recognized his artwork from several other comics. "The Thing On Sputnik 4" was inked by Marvin Stein. The Grand Comics Database says the cover and the other three Kirby strips in this comic were inked by Al Williamson.

Race For The Moon #1 was an anthology science fiction comic drawn by Bob Powell, and issues #2 and #3 were by Kirby. It's a shame it only lasted three issues. It's hard to see why this cover of Race For The Moon wasn't at least as intriguing to comic buyers as issues of DC Comics' Mystery In Space.

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