[jimmm kelly]

When I saw the pages on JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH in PAT BOONE No. 4, I immediately thought of you Prof, so I had to scan a couple and include them on the blog. There's a couple of other pages that I didn't scan, so if you want those let me know. Not that my scanning is any good--I don't have your skill with that.

The blog post IS too long. I considered breaking it up into multiple posts, but decided against that. By breaking it down into several parts in one post, with a contents list so you can click down to whichever part you want to look at, I hoped to make it a little easier to use.

I tried to avoid any Colletta inked pages as much as I could--but I thought it was important to include a little of the Vixen. I didn't use any Oksner art from SUPERMAN FAMILY because it was hopelessly ruined by Vinnie's inks.

Bob Oksner (according to his interview with Jim Amash) had no interest in super-heroes, but when DC stopped doing humour there wasn't much else he could do. For a guy who didn't think he was any good at it, he seemed to do a good job at the super-heroes. I loved his covers for all the Super titles.

As I say, his Mary Marvel was my favourite. But then the Marvel Family are better suited to a humourous take. As much as I liked Kurt Scaffenberger's work, I much preferred it when the art duties were split between Bob and Kurt in the SHAZAM! book.

It's telling that one of the last things Bob worked on for DC was AMBUSH BUG--even if he was just inking it. I think he must have enjoyed how it ridiculed the state of affairs at DC at that time.

[profh0011]

Sure, I'd love to have all of those pages.  The further I've gone into these recent blog projects, the less I've tended to be squeamish about posting stuff that isn't "PD". I tend to think the context helps.

Side-by-side in my mind with the JERRY LEWIS stuff (which I love) is the JIMMY OLSEN pages where Oksner was inking Mike Sekoswky (GHASTLY!!!!!).  They succumbed to the SICK compulsion to (AHEM!) "fix" Jack Kirby's art, but they let Sekowsky-Oksner go out as-is.  And some people think comics editors actually KNOW what the hell they're doing!

Every time I set up a new blog page, half the work (half the fun) is setting up the "links" to other pages-- so you can easily read from one page to the next one, or go back to the previous one, or, jump around to multiple versions of the same stories. And then there was all those dramatic readings and radio shows I found and posted links to...!

[jimmm kelly]

So for profh0011, what I've done is put up the other two pages of A JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH from PAT BOONE No. 4 on my blog, under the pages that are already posted there. I'll leave them up for a few days to give you time to copy them if you want them.

These two pages are largely text so they don't add much to my post and I'll take them down again in a few days.

[profh0011]

I grabbed 'em! Thanks.

[paw broon]

That's a great piece of work, jimmm.  I've bookmarked it for reading later and, if you don't mind, I'll send a link to a couple of folk.  This is a revelation to me as I was never a big fan of his work, not realising he did all those genres and  I only knew his name from the credited stories I had seen.  Thank you.

[jimmm kelly]

Oh please do share the link.

I think Oksner is one of the most overlooked of the great artists that worked at DC. Maybe because a lot of his stuff wasn't in the super-hero category.

For example, I'll be on the lookout for more SGT. BILKO comics to add to my collection in the future, as that's one I used to dismiss as not worth my time. The wonderful thing about these comics is that even if the story is by the book, there's so much eye candy to make it worthwhile.

Oksner's early art for Ned Pines was not that great--by his own admission--but Comic Book Plus needs to find COMPLETE BOOK OF COMICS AND FUNNIES, which features the first appearance of the oddball Wonderman by Oksner. I've been looking around on eBay for a copy, but so far no luck.

[jimmm kelly]

The latest of my checklists is now up on my blog. This one I call 27 Shades of Swan and I list some of the more significant inkers on Swan from over the years, ranking them from 27 to 1. Try to guess who you think will be in the 27th spot and who will be number 1.

As always, it took me longer than I thought to get it done. I always think this will be a piece of cake and then I encounter obstacles along the way. A lot of inks I thought were by one fellow turned out on further investigation not. Many contrary sources out there, but I'm putting my faith in Bob Hughes and Craig Delich.

It may well turn out that the credits I've given for some inkers are in error. And I may have to make revisions in the future. It's an evolving thing.

[crashryan]

A splendid piece of work, Jimmm, full of new discoveries for me. I love the plentiful examples, especially the original art which gives a much clearer picture of what each inker was up to. Thanks for your monumental effort.

[jimmm kelly]

The inks on the Hostess ads are really hard for me to identify. On my blog, I use an original art page that is credited to Vince Colletta--so I guess it's Vinnie's work, but it looks pretty good--I guess I expect the worst from Colleta.

One thing about that Hawkman Hostess ad is that in the background you see the concert is by Pete McCarthy and the Flyers. Any old time DC reader knows that Pete McCarthy and the Flyers were a doppelganger for Paul McCartney and Wings on Earth-One.

In his story from TEEN TITANS No. 46, Bob Rozakis establishes that, on Earth-One, two of the top bands are Pete McCarthy and the Flyers--with their rock anthems--and the Woodworkers--a soft rock duo, a la the Carpenters. But in actual fact, they are the very same people. I used to wonder if the Captain and Tenille and the Eurythmics weren't pulling the same stunt.

Since Pete McCarthy and the Flyers are headlining in that ad, I wonder if this means Bob Rozakis wrote the script.

[narfstar]

Astute observation and as good a guess as any. I will run it by the GCD crew.

[jimmm kelly]

In time for Carnaval, MY FAVOURITE FUNNIES is On the Fly down to Rio de Janeiro--OTF 17.02.15.

A relatively short post after the last ones I've done--this time I take a look at O TICO-TICO--the first magazine in Brazil to publish comics--and featuring the art of J. Carlos.

Up until just a few days ago, I had this great resource for looking at O TICO-TICO pages and hundreds of other Brazilian periodicals from the past--Hemeroteca Digital Brasileira--a digital directory I found by looking at the bottom of the Wikipedia page for O TICO-TICO.

However, this site went down a few days ago and it hasn't been up since. Lucky that I managed to save some PDF files for a sampling of O TICO-TICO issues before that happened. Or else I'd have nothing to put up today.

I'm no wiz at converting PDF files. The only way I could manage to extract the images from those files was by taking a screen shot. The screen shots are in turn saved as .png files and I then had to open those and save them as .jpg files--which I could then crop and prepare for posting as images on my blog site.

There must be an easier way.

I'll keep checking the link for the Brasil directory. There were some nice pages from CARETA that I wanted to use, but there weren't PDF files for that periodical. Had I known the site was going to go down, I would have taken screen shots directfly from the web page.

In the meantime, the University of Toronto Libraries has a master page with links for international digital journal directories. Click this link for the page.

I haven't checked all the links on the U of T page--some like the Brasil directory might not work--others might be inaccessible for some reason. But I know the Austria link works--as I used that directory before.

There might be some publications there that Comic Book Plus can use.

[jimmm kelly]

Good news, the Brasil directory is online again. A little late for me--oh well--but here's the web address--

http://hemerotecadigital.bn.br

I don't speak Portuguese, but I've kinda learned some just from going through these pages. The directory is alphabetical, but if you know the title you're looking for you're better off entering the name in the Titulos search engine.

This doesn't work for Para Todos--which I've figured out must mean "for all"--and just searches for everything in the directory. As such I haven't been able to find PARA TODOS in this directory--which is a shame because J. Carlos did some amazing covers for that publication over a long period of time.

[crashryan]

Jimmm, I checked out the Brazilian archive site. Looks interesting, but I can't find the link you mentioned to an alphabetical list of their periodicals. How is it labeled?

[jimmm kelly]

If you click Titulos, the search page that comes up has all the titles listed in alphabetical order [below the search box] that you can scroll down, page by page. Total de t

[profh0011]

I'm on a roll.  Someone at another site just e-mailed me the "Peter Pan" comic version of "JOURNEY".  Wow! Won't be able to get to it for some time, the POE project is going and I don't wanna lose momentum.

By the way, someone else pointed me to "Archive.org", which apparently has TONS of stuff posted online... but I, for the life of me, haven't been able to figure out their damnable search engine yet.  Don't you hate when people get paid good money to do TERRIBLE, incompetent design work?

[jimmm kelly]

There's lots and lots of stuff that is housed under the Archive.org umbrella. I never find stuff by going to that home page. For instance, I am listening to several old time radio shows that are under that umbrella, but I found them by doing individual searches using Bing (Google would also work)--you just need to know the terms to use.

As example, if I enter in the Bing search engine: richard diamond radio show complete series
--the top option that comes up is the archive.org site for that radio show (which I already have bookmarked).

[profh0011]

Somebody supplied me a link top CREEPY #69, and I was able to download every single page of it!!  I tried using the search engine... CREEPY #70 did not come up, but #76 came up, yet refused to let me go any further than a listing and a tiny thumbnail.  Someone else who knows the siter more than me then told me, as a matter of fact, CREEPY #70 is NOT on the site!  I said, "What are the odds?"

Someone else offered to supply me directly with MUCH BETTER scans of several books, including CREEPY #69 (after I already spent hours downloading it), but then the next day abruptly got bent out of shape because I was making MINOR adjustments to some of his scans.  It's a good thing I have so much to keep me busy.  I don't have time to worry about behavior like that.

The other day, by dumb luck, I ran across a Spanish POE comic, which apparently has never been published in English.  I spent ALL DAY today searching online and in mid-afternoon finally found a COMPLETE copy of the story (a mere 6 pages), which I got as part of a CBR file containing an ENTIRE reprint collection (I only needed the 6 pages plus the covers).  All cleaned up and posted now (the interiors from 3 DIFFERENT websites).  So now, I'm planning to use Google Translate to help me create a brand-new ENGLISH version.  This oughta be fun!

[jimmm kelly]

Seeing that The Night of March 31st came out in SUPERMAN No. 145 on newsstands March 16th, in 1961--I wanted to take a look at it again and the rest of that comic. Possible spoilers.

[jimmm kelly]

I'd like to confirm just who the guy in the bowtie is supposed to be:

https://myfavouritefunnies.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/curtstansm145.jpg

One source says it's Stan Kaye, another says it's Harry Donenfeld. That it's Stan Kaye makes more sense, given he's standing next to Curt Swan. That it's Harry Donenfeld seems rather random. Sheldon Moldoff inked this, but at the time Curt probably assumed Stan was going to ink this story (this would have been around when Stan left DC) so he put him in the scene.

I haven't been able to find photos of Stan and Harry from this time for comparison.

[jimmm kelly]

It's the Craze! My latest blog that is.

[jimmm kelly]

Celebrating my anniversary with an 80 PAGE GIANT ANNUAL--sort of. Check out 80 PIC. GIANT--it's the 20th issue of MY FAVOURITE FUNNIES, featuring the greatest super stories published during the last two years.

Also to keep track of all those ANNUALS and GIANTS, there's My Checklist: 80 Pg. Giant DC Classics.

[narfstar]

Here is something I noticed about SA giants. Harvey came out with their superhero line after the popularity of Batman on TV. Their teen Bunny comic outlasted their thriller line. Tower had more Tippy Teen and her friends books than superhero books. Even MF Enterprises had more Henry Brewster books than Captain Marvel books. Just an interesting observation I made.

[jimmm kelly]

Here is something I noticed about SA giants. Harvey came out with their superhero line after the popularity of Batman on TV. Their teen Bunny comic outlasted their thriller line. Tower had more Tippy Teen and her friends books than superhero books. Even MF Enterprises had more Henry Brewster books than Captain Marvel books. Just an interesting observation I made.

Now you tell me. I was going to do a little bit more with Archie, since I have some Giants from back then that I wanted to look at. But I ran out of time and I'm not sure where I stashed them.

But I've noticed that the Giant format was given over to teen humour in the latter half of the '60s as you mention with Tippy Teen. So maybe I'll make this its own theme for a future blog post.

DC branched off with other lines of Giants in the late '60s that weren't part of the G line. Who knows, I may get around to writing about them in the future.

As for why these big funny books may have been more popular than the super-hero type--from my own experience in the late '60s, I'd pick those up because they weren't such hard work. They were a good deal--and better to have a collection of funny stories, that way if one doesn't work there's a chance that the others will be better.

[crashryan]

I didn't remember how many new Archie-style comics appeared in the mid/late 60s. I never saw Henry Brewster though MF's gadawful Captain Marvel and Todd Holton comics appeared in the local drugstore. The other kid titles I ignored because at the time I was all about superheroes. My favorites were THUNDER Agents and its spin-offs. I liked the art and I liked the sense of humor in many stories. Tower comics were deucedly hard to find in our area. Tippy Teen was on the racks next to Dynamo and Co. but I never even bothered to pick one up. I missed a lot of interesting stuff back then (Angel and the Ape comes to mind) because of my monomania.

[narfstar]

I was fortunate enough, at the time, to have a cousin who picked up all the Archie  books and Harvey books. She did not collect them just read them then GAVE THEM TO ME. I do not remember her every getting Bunny or Henry Brewster but I think she got some Tippy. I think that the squarebound looked bigger even when they were not. For 25 cents you could get a 68 page Archie or Harvey Giant or for 24 cents two 36 page regulars. I never counted the pages but I thought the giants were over double the regular. I suspect that I was not the only one fooled.