Mar. 1955: This month I'm going with one of the most iconic and most often homaged covers of the ’50s, Frank Frazetta’s cover to Weird Science-Fantasy #29 (colors by Marie Severin). It was the last issue of the series, leaving EC with only Mad and its New Direction line of books. It was also the last comic book work Frazetta would do until Creepy #1 nearly ten years later (unless you count the work he did with Kurtzman and Elder on “Little Annie Fanny” for Playboy.
Frazetta broke into comics at Bernard Baily’s studio in 1944 at the age of 16. His first published work was an inking job, but later that year he penciled and inked a 4-page historical story for Treasure Comics #7, and he was off and running. Through the rest of the ’40s, he didn’t pencil very many stories, though he did a large number of headers and illustrations for the short text stories comic publishers had to run in order to qualify for the lower magazine postage rates. What stories he did draw tended to be humor/funny animal stories more often than not. In fact, his first ongoing feature was a Li’l Abner rip-off called “Looie Lazybones”—ironic since Frazetta left comics to work for Al Capp on that very same newspaper strip.
In the early ’50s he was given primarily westerns—westerns being at the peak of their popularity at that time—at DC, Magazine Enterprises, and Toby, and true life stories at Eastern Color, though he worked in other genres and for other publishers as well. But it was his work for EC, starting in 1952 and usually in collaboration with his buddy Al Williamson, that really stood out.
Apr. 1955: Again, not much going on this month, so here’s the first appearance of Ace the Bat-Hound by Win Mortimer (pencils and inks)—Batman #92. You know, because Bat-Hound.
This is the first comic book cover I remember grabbing my attention so much that I had to buy it. I had no idea who most of the characters on the cover were (didn't know Darkseid, but damn, the way he loomed over it all was impressive), but the layout and artistry in the entire image, along with the fact that my favorite character---the Flash, whom I knew was dead, but I had yet to read Crisis and find out the full arc of Wally & Barry---was hanging onto one of those giant hands gave me no choice but to purchase this book. Never regretted it.
May 1955: This month has a few interesting covers, but I'm going with a reprint. Since “The Newstand” doesn’t have any St. John comics in its database, we missed out on Mopsy—which ran from Feb. 1948 to Sept. 1953—in its original run, but thankfully Charlton reprinted much of that material in TV Teens #7-13. This issue, TV Teens #8, features a cover by Mopsy creator Gladys Parker which was originally used on St. John’s Mopsy #14, though the top has been cropped for the new title banner, and the background colors have been slightly changed. What I find particularly interesting with this cover is that Parker drew Mopsy’s (the dark-haired girl) bathing suit with no holding lines, something of a rarity for the time.
Parker was a real go-getter. She started out as a fashion designer, running her own dressmaking shop from home as a teenager in her hometown of Tonawanda, New York. In 1928 at the age of 18, she moved to Manhattan to study fashion illustration, and soon found herself drawing a comic strip called “May and Junie” for the New York Evening Graphic newspaper. She took over a fairly popular one-panel strip called Flapper Fanny Says in 1930, and continued with it until 1936. In 1939 she created the character she would become best known for, Mopsy, which ran as a newspaper strip until Parker’s retirement (likely due to health problems—she died from lung cancer in 1966) in 1965. At its peak the strip ran in over 300 papers—quite an achievement. St. John began running reprints of the strip in Pageant of Comics in 1947, and two years later gave it its own title which ran for 19 issues, and featured original material written and drawn by Parker.
Mopsy was visually based on Parker herself, after fellow strip artist Rube Goldberg told Parker her hair looked like a mop. And along with the success of the strip, Parker had equal success outside of the world of cartooning. She had her own clothing line sold in stores in 1934, and she also designed outfits for Hollywood films, eventually moving to Hollywood herself.
June 1955: This month I'm going with Hi-School Romance #42, cover art by Al Avison. While most romance comic covers tended to be more delicately illustrated, Avison’s bold, brushy inking makes for a nice change of pace. And his girls are every bit as lovely, or more so, as those found on most romance covers.
July 1955: It appears that I haven’t yet posted a Jack Davis cover in this month-by-month series, so this time I'm going with a two-for-one: Impact #4 and Incredible Science-Fiction #31. Davis started his career as an intern cartoonist for The Atlanta Journal, and while still in Georgia, he spent a few months inking the classic Mark Trail newspaper strip. In 1949 he made his way to New York and got a job inking The Saint newspaper strip. He also created a short-lived humor strip, Beauregard. He got his first comic book work in 1950 drawing a western book for a small company called Nation-Wide Publishing (who published the first Captain Atom—a space hero). But very soon thereafter he got his first assignment for EC, and he never looked back.
For the next few years, all his comic book work would be done for EC. Once EC closed down their comic book line in early 1956, though, Davis would look elsewhere. He continued on with Mad until 1957, and then did a few jobs for Marvel—mostly westerns—Playboy’s Trump magazine (under Harvey Kurtzman, who had also just left Mad), and Kurtzman’s Humbug magazine. In the early ’60s he worked on Cracked! and Help! (again under Kurtzman), and produced two complete issues for Dell’s Four Color under the title Yak Yak, which he wroted, penciled, inked, lettered, and colored. Through the rest of his career, Davis would spend most of his time in advertising and magazines, including a return to Mad, some stories for Warren, and, of course, his “Superfan” strip in Pro Quaterback magazine (Davis was a big sports fan).
I love the composition in this Impact cover. And the way the soldiers in the background are drawn in a fine pen line and flatted out in the colors ensures the soldier in the foreground, in full color and inked in bold brushstrokes, makes an even bigger “impact” as he jumps onto the grenade.
Love the spaceman’s gear, and the mammoth is simply awesome, from its twisted trunk to its floppy ears. There’s so much energy in the image!
July 1955: It appears that I haven’t yet posted a Jack Davis cover in this month-by-month series, so this time I'm going with a two-for-one: Impact #4 and Incredible Science-Fiction #31. Davis started his career as an intern cartoonist for The Atlanta Journal, and while still in Georgia, he spent a few months inking the classic Mark Trail newspaper strip. In 1949 he made his way to New York and got a job inking The Saint newspaper strip. He also created a short-lived humor strip, Beauregard. He got his first comic book work in 1950 drawing a western book for a small company called Nation-Wide Publishing (who published the first Captain Atom—a space hero). But very soon thereafter he got his first assignment for EC, and he never looked back.
For the next few years, all his comic book work would be done for EC. Once EC closed down their comic book line in early 1956, though, Davis would look elsewhere. He continued on with Mad until 1957, and then did a few jobs for Marvel—mostly westerns—Playboy’s Trump magazine (under Harvey Kurtzman, who had also just left Mad), and Kurtzman’s Humbug magazine. In the early ’60s he worked on Cracked! and Help! (again under Kurtzman), and produced two complete issues for Dell’s Four Color under the title Yak Yak, which he wroted, penciled, inked, lettered, and colored. Through the rest of his career, Davis would spend most of his time in advertising and magazines, including a return to Mad, some stories for Warren, and, of course, his “Superfan” strip in Pro Quaterback magazine (Davis was a big sports fan).
I love the composition in this Impact cover. And the way the soldiers in the background are drawn in a fine pen line and flatted out in the colors ensures the soldier in the foreground, in full color and inked in bold brushstrokes, makes an even bigger “impact” as he jumps onto the grenade.
Love the spaceman’s gear, and the mammoth is simply awesome, from its twisted trunk to its floppy ears. There’s so much energy in the image!
Man, that's a tour-de-force! Love Davis' "serious" work.
Aug. 1955: Following the wild success of the three “Davy Crockett” episodes of the Walt Disney’s Disneyland television anthology show (which were then compiled into a feature film), comics quickly jumped on the bandwagon. Daniel Boone was no stranger to comics, going back to appearances as early as 1940, and frontier adventures such as DC’s Tomahawk were already on the stands, but this month saw the premieres of two new Daniel Boone titles along with two new Davy Crockett series (and the second issue of a third Davy Crockett title). We have Charlton’s Davy Crockett #2, with a cover and lead story drawn by Dick Giordano, and Wild Frontier #1, (also featuring Crockett); Quality’s Exploits of Daniel Boone #1; DC’s Legends of Daniel Boone #1, with a cover and two stories drawn by Nick Cardy, who had already worked on the aforementioned Tomahawk; and Harvey’s Western Tales #31 (picking up the numbering from another title, it was the first issue under this name), with a Davy Crockett cover and three Crockett stories drawn (and probably written or co-written) by Jack Kirby! Despite the great talent involved on the other books, the best of these covers to my mind is Exploits of Daniel Boone #1, penciled by Dick Dillin and inked by Chuck Cuidera.
That Frazetta (and Williamson?) cover to Weird Science-Fantasy always reminded me of Wrightson on Swamp Thing #2 (or the other way round, speaking chronologically).
Aug. 1955: Following the wild success of the three “Davy Crockett” episodes of the Walt Disney’s Disneyland television anthology show (which were then compiled into a feature film), comics quickly jumped on the bandwagon. Daniel Boone was no stranger to comics, going back to appearances as early as 1940, and frontier adventures such as DC’s Tomahawk were already on the stands, but this month saw the premieres of two new Daniel Boone titles along with two new Davy Crockett series (and the second issue of a third Davy Crockett title). We have Charlton’s Davy Crockett #2, with a cover and lead story drawn by Dick Giordano, and Wild Frontier #1, (also featuring Crockett); Quality’s Exploits of Daniel Boone #1; DC’s Legends of Daniel Boone #1, with a cover and two stories drawn by Nick Cardy, who had already worked on the aforementioned Tomahawk; and Harvey’s Western Tales #31 (picking up the numbering from another title, it was the first issue under this name), with a Davy Crockett cover and three Crockett stories drawn (and probably written or co-written) by Jack Kirby! Despite the great talent involved on the other books, the best of these covers to my mind is Exploits of Daniel Boone #1, penciled by Dick Dillin and inked by Chuck Cuidera.
"Hey, fellas... It looks like we can fit a few more words on the cover. Howabout just sprinkling them all around on the bottom."
Aug. 1955: Following the wild success of the three “Davy Crockett” episodes of the Walt Disney’s Disneyland television anthology show (which were then compiled into a feature film), comics quickly jumped on the bandwagon. Daniel Boone was no stranger to comics, going back to appearances as early as 1940, and frontier adventures such as DC’s Tomahawk were already on the stands, but this month saw the premieres of two new Daniel Boone titles along with two new Davy Crockett series (and the second issue of a third Davy Crockett title). We have Charlton’s Davy Crockett #2, with a cover and lead story drawn by Dick Giordano, and Wild Frontier #1, (also featuring Crockett); Quality’s Exploits of Daniel Boone #1; DC’s Legends of Daniel Boone #1, with a cover and two stories drawn by Nick Cardy, who had already worked on the aforementioned Tomahawk; and Harvey’s Western Tales #31 (picking up the numbering from another title, it was the first issue under this name), with a Davy Crockett cover and three Crockett stories drawn (and probably written or co-written) by Jack Kirby! Despite the great talent involved on the other books, the best of these covers to my mind is Exploits of Daniel Boone #1, penciled by Dick Dillin and inked by Chuck Cuidera.
"Hey, fellas... It looks like we can fit a few more words on the cover. Howabout just sprinkling them all around on the bottom."
My mom gave me a DC-cover-a-day calendar for Christmas, because older folks still use calendars. Flipping through it quickly, most of the covers are from the past ten years, but there are some older ones sprinkled in. For the newer covers, though, there’s no trade dress—no title, no creator credits, etc., and there are no creator credits printed elsewhere on the calendar pages either. That irritates me a great deal. Since I don't always have time for one of my cover-a-month posts, I'm going to post some of this calendar’s covers here—with the creator credits—when I come across ones I like, or on days I don’t have time for a cover-a-month post. Just trying to put the “comic cover a day” back in “A Comic Cover a Day (is awesome)” for myself.
So here’s DC Comics Presents: The Metal Men #1 (Sept. 2011), penciled and inked (probably digitally inked) by Kevin Maguire.
That cover was reportedly the inspiration for the Steve Miller Band song "The Joker."
'Cause I'm a pioneer, I'm a trapper, I'm a woodsman, And I'm a hunter, Playin' my music in the sun. I'm an explorer, I'm a soldier, I'm a mid-night trail blazer, I get my lovin' on the run Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh
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Frazetta broke into comics at Bernard Baily’s studio in 1944 at the age of 16. His first published work was an inking job, but later that year he penciled and inked a 4-page historical story for Treasure Comics #7, and he was off and running. Through the rest of the ’40s, he didn’t pencil very many stories, though he did a large number of headers and illustrations for the short text stories comic publishers had to run in order to qualify for the lower magazine postage rates. What stories he did draw tended to be humor/funny animal stories more often than not. In fact, his first ongoing feature was a Li’l Abner rip-off called “Looie Lazybones”—ironic since Frazetta left comics to work for Al Capp on that very same newspaper strip.
In the early ’50s he was given primarily westerns—westerns being at the peak of their popularity at that time—at DC, Magazine Enterprises, and Toby, and true life stories at Eastern Color, though he worked in other genres and for other publishers as well. But it was his work for EC, starting in 1952 and usually in collaboration with his buddy Al Williamson, that really stood out.
New Gods Vol 1 #1
Cover date March 1971
Jack Kirby
++++++++++
Creepy #86
February 1977
Cover art by Ken Kelly
With a H/T to Martin Pasko, who had posted this to Facebook.
Parker was a real go-getter. She started out as a fashion designer, running her own dressmaking shop from home as a teenager in her hometown of Tonawanda, New York. In 1928 at the age of 18, she moved to Manhattan to study fashion illustration, and soon found herself drawing a comic strip called “May and Junie” for the New York Evening Graphic newspaper. She took over a fairly popular one-panel strip called Flapper Fanny Says in 1930, and continued with it until 1936. In 1939 she created the character she would become best known for, Mopsy, which ran as a newspaper strip until Parker’s retirement (likely due to health problems—she died from lung cancer in 1966) in 1965. At its peak the strip ran in over 300 papers—quite an achievement. St. John began running reprints of the strip in Pageant of Comics in 1947, and two years later gave it its own title which ran for 19 issues, and featured original material written and drawn by Parker.
Mopsy was visually based on Parker herself, after fellow strip artist Rube Goldberg told Parker her hair looked like a mop. And along with the success of the strip, Parker had equal success outside of the world of cartooning. She had her own clothing line sold in stores in 1934, and she also designed outfits for Hollywood films, eventually moving to Hollywood herself.
For the next few years, all his comic book work would be done for EC. Once EC closed down their comic book line in early 1956, though, Davis would look elsewhere. He continued on with Mad until 1957, and then did a few jobs for Marvel—mostly westerns—Playboy’s Trump magazine (under Harvey Kurtzman, who had also just left Mad), and Kurtzman’s Humbug magazine. In the early ’60s he worked on Cracked! and Help! (again under Kurtzman), and produced two complete issues for Dell’s Four Color under the title Yak Yak, which he wroted, penciled, inked, lettered, and colored. Through the rest of his career, Davis would spend most of his time in advertising and magazines, including a return to Mad, some stories for Warren, and, of course, his “Superfan” strip in Pro Quaterback magazine (Davis was a big sports fan).
I love the composition in this Impact cover. And the way the soldiers in the background are drawn in a fine pen line and flatted out in the colors ensures the soldier in the foreground, in full color and inked in bold brushstrokes, makes an even bigger “impact” as he jumps onto the grenade.
Love the spaceman’s gear, and the mammoth is simply awesome, from its twisted trunk to its floppy ears. There’s so much energy in the image!
So here’s DC Comics Presents: The Metal Men #1 (Sept. 2011), penciled and inked (probably digitally inked) by Kevin Maguire.
'Cause I'm a pioneer,
I'm a trapper,
I'm a woodsman,
And I'm a hunter,
Playin' my music in the sun.
I'm an explorer,
I'm a soldier,
I'm a mid-night trail blazer,
I get my lovin' on the run
Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh