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[jimmm kelly]

A few months ago, i was walking in a neighbourhood of the city I don't usually visit, when I caught the unmistakable scent of Fawcett Crest Charlie Brown books in the air. It's amazing how immediately the memory of getting those books came back to me--it was like I was instantly flashbacking to being a kid, tracking down a book I hadn't got.

I don't know where the smell was coming from, being unfamiliar with the neighbourhood, maybe a bookstore was close by. It wasn't simply the old paperback smell--all too routine for me--it was that specific smell of a fresh new copy of a Fawcett Crest pocket book.

To tie-in sort of with my Charlie Brown blog, I've now put up an extra blog page on those how-to guides for creating comics: Can You Draw, Too?
http://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/extra/x-4-can-you-draw-too/.

I might add some more how-to instructions at the bottom of the page in the future, if I find some that I like and I can scan them. There are quite a lot of them in the DC tabloids from the '70s, but it's a bother to scan tabloids on my scanner. And then I have to sew them together. It was enough of a problem sewing together pages from the tabloid-size AMAZING WORLD OF SUPERMAN: METROPOLIS EDITION (if you look close you can see the line where I sewed them together).

[Osgood Peabody]

Issue 10 should be up around the end of August and for that I plan to do something with Superman that will touch on SUPERMAN 164--but not in the way you'd think. So for Osgood Peabody, this will kind of cross over but not really.

I just posted my own 50th anniversary salute to the story here... http://marvelmasterworksfansite.yuku.com/reply/658774/The-DC-Comics-Time-Capsule-August-1963#reply-658774 in somewhat abbreviated fashion.

I've no doubt you will be more up to the task of doing justice to it, though, so I'm looking forward to your next installment!

[jimmm kelly]

I'm working on it. Hopefully, I'll be ready to post my blog in another week.

[jimmm kelly]

I strongly suspect some of the strips from the late 60's are by Curt Swan and Al Williamson.  Those would be the ones I read when I had the subscription back in '68-'69.  Someone else suggested it, I agreed, and another BIG Swan fan said, "It could be."  And while I was checking I found an article saying Williamson was Swan's favorite inker for his stuff.  (I blame Al Stenzel, who was in charge, for removing artists credits during his tenure.  That ain't right!)

Getting back to this, as I work on my Superman project, I was looking at a book I have on Swan--CURT SWAN: A LIFE IN COMICS (2002, Vanguard) by Eddy Zeno--and there are three pages in there where he talks to Al Williamson. And it's pretty clear from what Williamson says that he hadn't worked on Swan's pencils before coming onto Superman in the early '80s.

In fact, the inking job on Swan came about because Williamson had done something for SUPERMAN 400 for Julie Schwartz and Schwartz asked him on the strength of that if he wanted to do some inking for him. To which he said, "You know, I've never really inked anybody else."

He goes on to say he helped other guys out--like George Woodbridge--"we always helped each other . . . But I never did a complete inking job over anybody."

He says that when he got Swan's pencil pages, he'd never seen Curt's pencils before--he'd only seen his work after it was inked. "I didn't realize he was such a good artist! He could draw very, very well."

Also, if you check my Can You Draw, Too? page, at the bottom, I have the inside back cover from SUPERMAN 245/DC-7 which came out in late '71, where Swan does Superman faces. This is made to look sketchy--but in those days they couldn't have shot it from the pencils, so I'm pretty sure it's an example of Swan inking Swan.

[profh0011]

Someone (it might have been you) mentioned Swan's inks looked like Williamson's. That was enough for me!  I went back and changed all the credits at the blog to indicate Curt Swan on those strips. It looks like he did it for about 4-1/2 years, with a variety of inking styles on certain ones.  There's a few that actually remind me of Vince Colletta-- except A LOT better!!! But overall, the general look and "feel" of the strips, faces, poses, figures, all scream "Curt Swan" (some more or less than others).  My guess is he took over sometime in 1968 and stayed with the series until it ended (or went on hiatus) in January 1973.

A year-and-a-half later, it was revived, and went thru multiple artists over a few years, none of whom I have been able to identify.  It's not until early 1979 that Frank Bolle takes over.  I could tell when, they changed the text formatting, the line rendering changed (more straight lines, fewer sweeping curves), and, he SIGNED his work... but in a sneaky way. I think at some point someone either told him to stop doing it, or began having the signatures whited out.  (Don't you hate that?)

I'm also wondering when Bob LeRose dropped off, as he'd been apparently doing ALL the coloring on the J&C and Stenzel Prod. strips from 1952-up.  But he joined DC full-time in the 70's.  There's a point where the art on the BIBLE strips looked like stained-glass windows, with highly-stylized shading lines and open spaces for contrasting color shading. VERY "Peter Max"-like.  And then there was a point where those lines continued, but the colorist began to IGNORE them.  WTF?  My instinct tells me that may be the point where LeRose left, and his replacement didn't know what was going on with those lines.

[jimmm kelly]

Oh yes, I know we discussed it and you changed the credits, but these questions stick with me and I'm always looking for information to either confirm or contradict what I think. So seeing those comments by Williamson helped clear up any doubts I had.

I think Frank Bolle did some work on the MARVEL CLASSIC COMICS. I have a stack of those I've been meaning to get to for years. One day, I'd like to read them--and any others I can get. If I ever find the time.

Right now, I'm bothered by the contradictory credits on DC covers in the early '70s. GCD says one thing, but Mike's Amazing World says another. In most cases I'm disposed to believe the GCD. But for example on SUPERMAN 245/DC-7, the GCD says that Swan and Anderson did the cover (front and back), while Mike says Murphy did the cover on his own.

Which to believe? If the GCD has Schwartz's files, it seems like they have the correct info. But Anderson was good at faking the Swanderson look. And the composition, the poses look like the kind of thing he would do. And on the back cover, you have all those characters, especially Hawkman, that Murphy would be good at doing. Swan was never as good at doing Hawkman. Anderson is a kind of Golden Age geek, so he would be into drawing Kid Eternity. Or it might be a case where Curt did some of the pencils, but Murphy did the others.

[profh0011]

When it comes to identifying artists, I like to think I'm pretty good (but mostly with older ones-- by which I mean, nothing in the last 10-20 years). But Nick Caputo blows me out of the water.  When I worked on Nick Simon's site, I often consulted with Nick Caputo. Most times we'd agree. Most times, I'd realize he was right. A FEW times he's say I was right. But he was always helpful, and one of the guys who contributes to the GCD whose opinion I trust the most.

As for writer's credits... that's a MINE FIELD (as anyone who's on any "Jack Kirby" group will tell you-- the "Stan Lee" contingent will harass you to death for trying to speak the painfully obvious truth).

A particular one that sticks in my head was CAPTAIN MAR-VELL #11-12, which I believe have the wrong (or at least, incomplete) credits for writer listed. It's funny that a really HORRIBLE run of comics should draw so much of my attention, but I read the first 25 issues of that series 3 times in the last 12 years.  And by the 3rd time, a lot of mysteries became quite plain to me.

Arnold Drake is credited with #11-12, but not only does the entire thrust of the story change 4 PAGES into #11, so does the writing style. And, from then on, it's all CONSISTENT with #13-15... which are by Gary Friedrich.  Drake told me he had a record of being paid for #12, but couldn't find it for #11.  No matter.  My conclusion? Drake wrote #11-12... but what he wrote was NOT what was published.

Since #11 also switches artists ABRUPTLY (the "story" in the Bull**** page about Dick Ayers "wanting a break from drawing both SGT. FURY and CAPT. SAVAGE" is obviously bunk-- Ayers LOVED doing war comics!!!).  You don't just swap artists because one of them wants a "break".  Anyway, #11 contained the WORST art job I have ever seen back then from both Dick Ayers AND Vince Colletta.  My conclusion?  Stan Lee decided he wanted a DRASTIC change in the book-- NOW-- which, among other things, would give him an excuse to BOOT Arnold Drake out the door (Drake complained that Lee kept accusing him of being a "Communist", because back at DC, Drake had tried to get medical benefits for freelancers).  And I suspect the entire book was done OVER A WEEKEND-- script and full art.

I keep picturing that, somewhere, there may be an entire issue of Don Heck pencils that were never used, sitting in some drawer.

[jimmm kelly]

Trying to identify writers would be harder. But in the reading I've been doing lately, I've noticed some things that would probably identify the writer, if I didn't already know the credits.

Mort Weisinger maintained that he came up with the plots and gave them to the writers (Carmine Infantino, suggests that Mort stole plots from one writer and gave them to another). So in this sense it should be more confusing who wrote what. But when Weisinger has an old plot recycled, it tends to go through the same motions as the previous story. Whereas, when a writer re-uses one of his own ideas, he tends to try to come up with a new turn on it.

Also there are distinct traits to a Siegel vs. a Hamilton script--like on Legion of Super-Heroes. Siegel tended to do the more oddball goofy stories, while Hamilton tended to do stories that took alien cultures a little more seriously.

Some years ago, before all the credits were known on Elongated Man in DETECTIVE, I was reading all of those and I noticed that while Fox tended to do exposition in long captions, Broome tended to do exposition in dialogue balloons. Broome's was a more theatrical approach--where the characers in a play have to set up elements of the plot through conversation. While Fox was using a prose fiction approach, where things are explained through the narrative voice.

But to pick up on these things, I have to read a lot of one writer's work--and even then it's difficult to guess.

[jimmm kelly]

The super spectacular tenth issue of my blog is now publicly published. What a big one this was. But I've divided it up into parts, which makes it easier, I think. You can select which part you want to look at by using the handy table of contents.

MY SUPERMAN SUMMER

And connected with that is the new checklist: 50 Light Years to Lexor

[jimmm kelly]

I only decided to add my About piece on Edmond Hamilton yesterday, so I haven't had a lot of time to research his work on Captain Future. But as I say on the blog, Mort Weisinger was the one who actually came up with the idea (at the first Science Fiction WorldCon in New York, organized by Julie Schwartz). And Mort was working for Better Publications at the time.

Better got into comics around that time and there's some of their comics on CB+. So I wonder if the CAPTAIN FUTURE pulp magazine is in the public domain--or did someone make sure to keep up the copyrights on that?

I see that there's a mammoth book which collects those stories by Hamilton, as well.

[profh0011]

The thing that caught my attention, oddly enough, was SUPERMAN 238, with the art by GRAY MORROW.  I downloaded that page for my collection.

It still makes me shake my head in dismay that it took me decades to "connect" that the "Gray Morrow" who did all those cool (and often weird) comics was the same guy whose name appeared as "storyboards" on the end credits of al the 2nd & 3rd-season episodes of SPIDER-MAN (1968, 1969).  When I got the oversized art book collecting his work, I figured out that the reason he may have been hired by Ralph Bakshi to work on that show may have been that they shared the same color sense (PSYCHEDELIC, man!!).  Once I made the connection, I realized just how recognizable his style was on those later episodes. It's criminal Steven Krantz gave Bakshi such a PITIFULLY tiny budget to work with, so we never got to see Morrow's wonderful design work animated "properly".  It's no wonder Grantray-Lawrence went bankrupt earlier...

[profh0011]

http://xa.yimg.com/kq/groups/8784545/homepage/name/homepage.jpg?type=sn

This image pays tribute to both John Romita (Spidey) and Gray Morrow (the villains), plus whoever was doing those whacked-out psychedelic skylines (also Morrow?).

[jimmm kelly]

I'm pretty sure Morrow must've been allowed to do his own colours on the varied jobs he got at DC--because all the ones I've seen have this unique aesthetic vision. But how amazing is that, that Morrow would be allowed to do that--rather than someone in the production department.

A lot of the work he got at DC was for other genres like mystery and western. And I didn't buy many of those comics. Some of this has been reprinted in SHOWCASE volumes, but there's no colour in those. And anyway, it's a totally different thing to see colour reconstruction rather than the real colours that were done expressly for those newsprint comics. I should make a list and hunt down back issues of them.

DC always had pretty good cover colours up until then, thanks to Jack Adler. But one of the things that struck me as I returned to DC in '71 was some of the great colour shading on the inside stories. The art job on 240 was another one where I noticed the colours on Swan and Giordano's art--a different aesthetic sense from the Morrow story, but stlll good stuff.

It is funny that Morrow was the guy who did the Spider-Man cartoons. That was something I totally missed for many years. But then I didn't really pay attention to the art when I watched those shows as a kid--and the animation was pretty bad.

[profh0011]

It's nuts.  Martin Goodman struck a deal with Steven Krantz to do THE MARVEL SUPER-HEROES SHOW, and Kranzt (a distributor) got in touch with Grantray-Lawrence, who became notorious for EXTREMELY-limited animation on those shows.

I understand fans were horrified when they heard G-L would be doing SPIDER-MAN the next year. Who could imagine the show would have the BEST animation seen on TV since JONNY QUEST?

But after one glorious season, G-L went BANKRUPT after only finishing ONE episode for the 2nd season.  That's when Krantz hired Ralph Bakshi to set up a new studio in a NYC warehouse, and knock out the 2nd season, so Krantz wouldn't have to pay the money back.  Bakshi hired Morrow, and also licenced production music from the KPM, Capitol & DeWolf libraries.  The 2nd & 3rd seasons were real hybrids, combining new and old animation, and new and older music.  And the styles were COMPLETELY different!  The new animation was NOT QUITE as limited as THE MARVEL SUPER-HEROES SHOW had been... but close.

The same year they did the 2nd season of SPIDER-MAN, they also did the 3rd series of ROCKET ROBIN HOOD.  Like Spidey, these were COMPLETELY different from the earlier episodes.  Watching as a kid, I kept wondering, "What the HELL is this???"  The following year, when the money COMPLETELY ran out, and they were desperately trying to complete the last of 52 episodes needed for a successful syndication package, they started doing remakes of earlier episodes from Seasons 1 & 2... and also, 2 of the 3rd-season ROCKET ROBIN HOODs.  Totally nuts!!!

It flipped me out that it took me so long to realize the weird, demented art  was seeing in the later episodes was Gray Morrow's work.  Right about that time, I'd just managed to put together a comp with some of the KPM tracks a fan in California had sent me (he was a fan of production music, but, had never seen the cartoon, and had NO IDEA the tracks had been used on the show!). I hoped to send Morrow a copy of the disc... but then I found out he had JUST passed away.  (I hate when that happens...)

He spent the last 20 years of his life doing the TARZAN newspaper strip. He said it was his favorite of all the work he'd ever done.  I never saw a single one of his strips until after he was gone.  It was great stuff!

[jimmm kelly]

Gray Morrow worked on a strip that was in the MENOMONEE FALLS GAZETTE, which I subscribed to circa '74. I believe it was FRIDAY FOSTER and as I recall the art didn't look like Morrow's style. I'll have to dig those out one day and check.

[Osgood Peabody]

I loved the new entry.  I need to go back and read through it at more leisure when I have some time - there's so much to take in!  I especially enjoyed learning more about Edmond Hamilton, one of my favorite writers.

Regarding the Lexor saga, I have some vague but persistent memory that ENB at some point explained away the scene in Action #365 where the people turn on Luthor as a Virus X induced hallucination, and that it never happened!

But for the life of me, I can't remember where it was - probably in some letter column response.  I'll see if I can track it down, because now it's bugging me...

[jimmm kelly]

I'll have to look through my issues, as well, and see if I can find that ENB comment.

I looked at some of the letter columns but not all of them, because that would be more work.

The issue where I think there would have been comment on SUPERMAN 164 had an acknowledgement of the JFK assassination in place of a letter column. It's such a sobering thought, that I didn't want to refer to it in my blog. Too painful a memory even now for me to refer to it in a blog about fantasy comics.

Another interesting factoid I didn't mention was that Edmond Hamilton created Batwoman. He says this in the article reproduced in the TwoMorrow's LEGION COMPANION (I couldn't find if this article appeared anywhere else before--Hamilton wrote it not long before his death). But he mentions the creation in passing, like it's no big thing that he created this character.

I knew that he wrote the first story that introduces The Batwoman. But I just assumed the character was given to him by Jack Schiff--and that Bob Kane played a role in her creation. Of course, Kane lies. But this was one case where I thought his claim was legitimate because she IS Kathy KANE.

I didn't mention it, because it didn't seem to fit (should I then mention all the other characters he created? we would be here all day) but also I wasn't sure about the claim. He wrote the script, but I'm sure that others had a hand in it. Jack Schiff most likely. And calling her Kathy Kane might have been Bob's idea--given his ego. So it's hard to say that Hamilton created the Batwoman--but he did create the story that introduced her.

Like with Captain Future. In fact, Mort Weisinger came up with the original idea, but after that there was a back and forth where Hamilton discussed the characters they wanted him to use and had his own changes he wanted to make. So in this kind of process it's hard to say who created what.

It's funny how much of this was created over the phone. In the LEGION COMPANION, Jim Shooter tells of his own phone experience. It's weird to think of this kid at home with his family and sitting on the phone talking over the plot for his next story with the belicose Mort Weisinger.

[jimmm kelly]

ACTION COMICS 368 and 369 have comments on Lexor from 365, but I don't see any telling remarks from ENB.

When someone says Superman couldn't have seen Lexor with his supervision, because of the red sun, Bridwell says they goofed.

In fact, I would say that the bier passed close to the solar system, but not through the system. Superman would have charted a different course. We see the bier passing through the sky, but that makes no sense, because he wouldn't go so near any planet's gravitational pull--that would pull it off course. Having the bier go through the sky was the real error--but it's the nature of figurative comics to do that.

Good old Gary Skinner writes a letter of complaint about the Lexorian rebellion. Bridwell answers that they have a tale full of surprises for Lexor ahead. If by surprises he means ignoring it almost completely for fifteen years and then destroying it then, yes, those are surprises.

My explanation for the rebellion would be that this crowd is hopped up on Madness Flowers. We only see random groups of people, but not the whole population. So these people were rounded up and order was restored. I'd also say that Luthor confessed his crimes openly to Ardora before this--and she forgave him, as mentioned in 544--so when she defends him in 365, she's already made her peace with his actions.

In the grand tradition of all Bridwell letter columns, it's up to the reader to find his own explanations for these daft lapses in judgement.

[jimmm kelly]

I pulled out a few of my issues of MENOMONEE FALLS GAZETTE and it was on FRIDAY FOSTER that Gray Morrow worked for awhile. His style is there, but not in the main figures. In the backgrounds and his inking on those, you can see Morrow's style.

On my Lexor page I speculated that maybe IDW would get around to doing the SUPERMAN Sundays for the early '60s. On the other hand, i see that another publisher is continuing SUPERMAN for the '40s. But it's like molasses waiting for these to come out.

Back when I was looking at '60s BATMAN on microfilm, I also looked around for microfilm of other papers that would've carried SUPERMAN or BATMAN, but I didn't have much luck. If I can figure out which papers carried Superman in the early '60s, I'll give it a go at trying to find them on microfilm if the library has them. As I'd like to see how Wayne Boring handled the whole showdown between Luthor and Superman.

[Osgood Peabody]

IDW plans to publish all of the Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman comic strips that appeared through the years, at least according to this article:

http://www.libraryofamericancomics.com/blog/article/2519/

I've read the first volume of daily Superman strips from 1959-61, and they were fantastic!  Curt Swan's version of "Superman's Return to Krypton" is like getting the director's cut of the story!

As far as the ENB comment on Lexor, I've got some people tracking that down in our Time Capsule thread.

I suspect it occurred sometime in the late 70s/early 80s, but I'll keep you posted.

[Osgood Peabody]

Thanks to Commander Benson, we've been able to track down ENB's explanation of the scene from AC #365- it was in an LC and later expanded on in a Superman vs. Luthor digest - see here for the complete details:

http://marvelmasterworksfansite.yuku.com/topic/23674/master/1/?page=8

[jimmm kelly]

Oh thanks for that. I have the comics in which these comments appeared, so I'll find them and fit some of this into my blog page where it applies. Although, personally, I think Bridwell's latter day comments were a bit of a hallucination of their own.

A better explanation is that Superman used his powers to observe Lexor from afar and DiD see the rebellions, but the rest was his own extrapolation of what was happening, based on flimsy evidence. Of course, his mind was on other things, so we shouldnt be too hard on the old Kryptonian.

[jimmm kelly]

Okay, I've now added another entry to my 50 Light Years to Lexor page to cover Bridwell's prevarications.

Glad that's sorted.

Sorted, there's a British expression. Many years of watching the telly, and British imports, seems to have affected my sense of the English language. So many times I was tempted to type an hallucination. That just sounds right to me. But according to most rules of English you don't put an before an aspirated h.

However, looking up this rule on the internet, I found that there's a British loophole, where it's proper in speech to put an before an aspirated h when the word is three syllables or more. And this is my automatic instinct. Before one or two syllables, I have no problem. It's when I come to those polysyllabic words that I have an itch to say an.

On another bizarre topic, I realized that maybe the title for my page should have been 50 Light Years from Lexor not to--because if Lexor is 50 light years away, then it's 50 years in the past. If it's 50 light years to Lexor, then we would get there 50 years in its future.

But these days I'm trying to come up with shorter titles for my blogs--for many reasons, including the length of the URL and how it appears on the index--so I'm always counting letters, and I save two letters by using to rather than from. And I save one letter by using a rather than an.

[SuperScrounge]

Another interesting factoid I didn't mention was that Edmond Hamilton created Batwoman. He says this in the article reproduced in the TwoMorrow's LEGION COMPANION (I couldn't find if this article appeared anywhere else before--Hamilton wrote it not long before his death).

I believe that would be Weird Heroes Volume 6.

[jimmm kelly]

Oh, thanks a lot for the info. I'll make use of it.