The Fabuleous Fifties

Not So Super

Friday Comic Book Day.

I don't usually pinch from other people's blogs, but Brian Hughes Again With the Comics had a great superhero parody from the forties on his blog, that I just had to share (http://againwiththecomics.blogspot.com/2009/02/hugh-mann-impossible-man.html). The artist is George Marcoux, who even shouldn't have been making comics at that point. He had a shortlived newspaper strip in the late thirties, that was discontinued in februari 1939 and for a couple of days replaced with the statement that the artist had stoped the strip due to ill health. My gues is that he was quite an old man when the comics strted and one of many oldtimers filling those early comic books. Columnist Charles Driscoll repeatedly mentioned Marcoux, often adding 'the most remarkable kid cartoonist of our age', so he may have been a famous magazine cartoonist in his time. The style of his newspaper strip is quite different from the lively style he used in The Impossible Man. The comic book story appeared in Meteor #1. The GCD entry for this one-shot title was done by Arthur Lortie, whom I have always found very reliable. He also syas there is another Marcoux story in the same book. According to some intrenet source Marcoux was also the creator of another superhero parody, Supersnipe, who appeared in comics betwen 1942 and 1949. But none in the lively style we see here.






The last two weeks of Marcoux's strip Toddy:













Marcoux gets mentioned on Oct 28 1929, long before he did Toddy.



Here are two Supersnipe covers, which look a lot more like Toddy. I am getting more and more doubts about the attribution of Marcoux as th artist for The Impossible Man and equally more interested in who this artist might actually be.