John Wayne Adventure Comics #8
The stories in this earlier John Wayne issue are much more what I'd expect in a kids' comic than those in the later issue. For instance no one shoots himself in the head.
In the lead story, having extra pages allows the writer to flesh the story out a bit. As much as I am a Williamson/Frazetta fan, I admit their artwork here doesn't serve the story well. They obviously only wanted to draw the figures and sloughed off everything else. The sequence on our pages 9-10, in which the kid arrives at the station and is hazed by local toughs, suffers from lack of backgrounds. The train station in the last panel of page 9 is pathetic. Where are we in page 10 panel 1? If you look hard you see the red shape is supposed to be a batwing saloon door. We need more than that to sell the action. By the way, who is the character in panel 2 saying, "Yuh varmints better leave that kid alone"? At first I thought it was supposed to be John Wayne, but Wayne is clean-shaven and makes his entry in panel 8.
Similarly the blowout of the oil well (page 13 panel 6) is the payoff of the entire story. It deserves more than a pile of indistinct blobs. I admit I'm more hung up on backgrounds than the average American comic artist, but sometimes you gotta show where things are happening!
"The Ugly Duckling Bandit" is basically a crime story with Wayne's sidekick standing in for Mr Crime. Not a bad story, though when I started reading it I thought, "What, two kid-with-attitude stories in a row?" Williamson and Frazetta put more work into this story than they did the previous one. But they cop out again on the story's most important scene (our page 19, panel 1)! The whole point is that the kid pulls the mask off the bandit, which makes the bandit want to kill him, which triggers the bandit's attack of conscience. Williamson draws the kid just standing there with his hands behind his back. The mask is an indistinct shape on the floor. The only clue we have that the boy unmasked the bandit is the man saying, "Bobby, what have you done?" We need to see that Bobby has pulled off the bandit's mask. Bobby needs an active pose, his body twisted away from the bandit, the mask in his fist still fluttering in the air.
"Duel of Death" features a good early Leonard Starr art job. While his drawing may lack the larger-than-life flair of Williamson-Frazetta, he combines solid draughtsmanship with a good sense of place. The story itself rubs me the wrong way. As I understand it, John Wayne's dad shot and killed Nameless Donnehy's dad. Nameless, who believes Dad Wayne plugged Dad Donnehy in the back, is consumed with a desire for revenge. John Wayne produces Dad Donnehy's old pal, who assures Nameless that Dad Wayne killed Dad Donnehy "fair an' square" in a face-to-face gunfight. Hearing this, Nameless immediately abandons his quest for revenge and presumably joins smiling John Wayne at the bar for a drink.
The fact remains that Dad Wayne killed Dad Donnehy in a gunfight! Maybe in the good ol' frontier days, if your old man was shot "fair an' square" you just went on with your life and that was that. I kind of doubt it. I'd expect Nameless still to harbor resentment toward John Wayne. Wouldn't he at least wonder why Dad Wayne was justified in killing Dad Donnehy in the first place?
Before I go I wanted to put in my two cents' worth on the subject of likenesses. I'm fascinated that the ability to draw people well and the ability to capture a likeness don't automatically go together. There are artists who can draw both excellent figures and good likenesses. There are also great figure men who can't draw a decent likeness. And there are portrait artists who can produce perfect likenesses yet have mediocre figure drawing skills.
I probably already mentioned this somewhere, but in the Golden and Silver Ages--heck, all the way up until the 1980s--getting likenesses in comics was a tall order. To draw a likeness you need reference. I suppose there's an artist out there who could watch a John Wayne movie, go home, and draw a good likeness, but I never heard of one. You need photos of the actors. In some cases, like one-shot movie adaptations, the studio might provide a bunch of stills to work from. I doubt that was the case with comics like John Wayne Adventures because so many different artists worked on the stories that it was impractical to print up photos for all of them.
That left promotional photos from movie fan magazines and newspaper clippings. Next challenge: promotional photos tended to be three-quarter or full-face shots. In a comic you have to draw profiles, 3/4 rear, downshots and such. Making up those other angles is a hit-or-miss proposition. Expressions, too. Maybe your story calls for dramatic emotions. Faces change a lot under strong emotion. Your character is supposed to growl but you only have a couple of smiling head shots. You have to fake it the best you can. You see this all the time in movie and TV comics. The hero looks dead on model in one panel but loses it in the next.
Nowadays we are awash in reference. Load a John Wayne movie, then capture any head, any pose you want. Print it out for projection or trace over it in a digital drawing program. Wish I'd had that when I was drawing TV tie-ins.
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Topic: Reading Group # 359 John Wayne + (Read 1108 times)
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