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| Ronald Carson Gold is best known as a short story writer whose work is largely forgotten today. As well as Devil Doone, he wrote detective and western stories. He was later an elected executive member of the Queensland Authors and Artists Association, and coordinated its annual short story competition. After his death, this competition continued as the annual R Carson Gold Short Story Competition. I'm uncertain if this still exists, but the trust fund established to pay the prize money was still active in 2019. |
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| Mendoza is June Yvonne Mendoza, AO, OBE, RP, ROI, HonSWA - a portrait painter who worked in comics for a few year during Australia's golden age. Her formal instruction in portraiture began at the age of 14, her comics work occurred in her early 20s, and she moved to England in the early 1950s (where she also drew some comics). She was commissioned to paint portraits of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, Sammy Davis Junior, Sean Connery, Princess Diana, Queen Elizabeth II (twice), HM Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, Sir William McMahon, Prince Edward, Baroness Margaret Thatcher, Sir John Major, Sir John Gorton, Corazon Aquino, Goh Chok Tong and many others. She died in 2024, less than a month before what would have been her 100th birthday. She was interviewed in 2014 by Pikitia Press (https:pikitiapress.blogspot.com/2014/01/june-mendoza-interview.html) |
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| Carl Lyon was a commercial artist who turned his hand to comics during the golden age. He did a lot of work for Frank Johnson and apparently originated the popular Avian Tempest in Little Trimmer. As well as Devil Doone, he worked on other detective comics including Tim O'Hara (originally a newspaper strip, later collected in comic books) and the Astounding Mr Storm. He also wrote and illustrated children's books. He became the assistant to Stan Cross on the popular and long-running Wally and the Major, taking the feature over when Cross retired. He worked exclusively on this strip until 1979 when Lyon retired, and sadly only lived for another three years. |
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| Many thanks, Dan! Of course Dev and his sidekick "Desert Head" enjoyed a pretty long career, lasting until the early 1970s. I always associate the strip with Hart Amos, who worked on it for many years; the late 1960s reprints that K G Murray issued about once a year in the late '60s-early '70s were my introduction to the feature, as I was far too young for (mild) girlie mags such as "Man Junior)! |
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| I think it's no coincidence that Hart Amos did the humour content of this first issue of Devil Doone - I believe he was already the Devil artist on the first-published version of the stories in Man Junior at this time. Between Carl Lyon, June Mendoza and Hart Amos, the series has great quality in the art department, though obviously different from each other. BTW, my introduction to Australia's Golden Age was similarly through a reprint: I got an issue of Catman in a sample bag at Sydney's Royal Easter Show. Not sure which one - the last four issues of Catman all reprinted the same story, about a year apart from each other |
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