Friday Comic Book Day.
I have said before that I think Klaus Nordling was a very good comic book artist. These days, being a succes is seen as a large part of quality, so the fact that he never created a hit must be a sign that he wasn't as good or important. And although he may not be the pioneer or inventor Will Eisner was, his works sometimes is just as good. His main claim to fame is Lady Luck. I am not so much into superheroes and find The Barker a lot more interestting, but Lady Luck has a lot to say for it as well. Apparently Nordling wrote his stories himself, whereas Eisner often used ghost writers (to great effect) on the Spirit. The Lady Luck stories appeared in the same sunday section The PSirit appeared in, but they were only four pages long, so Norling had to be even more inventive with his splash pages. It wasn't until he started doing the longer Barker stories, taht he could show that he could do as good a spalsh page as any of his peers. But here we often see him at his most creative. Michael T. Gilbert used to show the splash pages on his Mr. Monster blog until they ran out. But now, thanks to internet sharing I can give you whole stories.
From the reprint in Smash #51:
From the reprint in Smash #52
2 comments:
Thanks for posting these Nordling strips. As you said, Nordling was a good writer and really knew how to pack a story into four pages. Let today's 12-title-story-arc writers try that!
I still wonder about these WWII undercover villains who kept Nazi flags and pictures of Hitler in their lockers and under their pillows. Would an undercover American spy in Berlin keep an Uncle Sam poster in his medicine cabinet? Maybe in comics, he would!
By the way, over on my page I posted some Dawn O'Day dailies I found. They seem to be an earlier part of the story that ends in the dailies you posted.
…and who would think that, before the age of DNA analysis, blood on a diner dish rag would be particularly incriminating?
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