Hi Guys,
I've heard this book being mentioned among the first graphic novels.
Here's a link for it to see.
Jim, anyone - care to guess who the artist might be and was it a normal comic somewhere else or done for the book?
http://www.samuelsdesign.com/comics/?p=108
-Yoc
First of all, folks,
There were wonderful Graphic Novels back in 1929/30. If you have never read Lynd Ward's Vertigo, Gods' Man, etc. or Milt Gross's He Done Her Wrong, then you are missing a great deal of comic/graphic history.
I think the artist on "Mansion of Evil" is Bud Thompson - a stalwart Fawcett regular (Gold Medal Books is a Fawcett brand) who's probably best known for his later Captain Marvel Jr. stories - though there is ample evidence of other hands assisting.
People keep "rediscovering" these things primarily because there is no central location in comics to store the data. Jerry Bails' (and Hames Ware's - though he seems to have been shunted aside in the labeling of the on-line version) Who's Who SHOULD be that location, but it is frozen in time and becomes less and less accurate as we delve deeper into older books that most people couldn't afford to look at in the past - thanks much to GAC-UK.
Anyway - I own a copy of this book and have for decades. At 180 paperback pages, that's a decent length but one must consider that each page is about 1/2 a comic book page. Even 90 pages qualifies these days for "novel", but these are not anywhere near FIRST. Go back to the 1920s/30s to Frans Masereel, Lynd Ward and others for the REAL roots.
my 2