Saturday Leftover Day.Al Hartley is known to most collectors for his romance work in the mid to late fifties for Timely (the company Stan Lee managed, which went on to become Marvel). When superheroes took over comics, he went over to Archie comics and worked there for the rest of his life. While solid, none of this work is exciting. Slightly more exciting are his Christian comic, which he did for an out fit called Spire in the seventies. Most of them are downloadable here: www.carpsplace.com/spire/spire.html (including I Am Johnny Cash comic, for instance). But personally I think he did his best work for Stan Lee's Mad imitations. I have been scanning material for a huge article I have written on the subject for Roy Thomas' comics history magazine Alter Ego. It will appear after the summer and shouold be in the Preview catalogue soon (if not this month). Al Hartley's stories always feature the prettiest ladies you have ever seen. Before that, he mainly did war stories from Stan Lee, which I haven't scanned in yet. He also did covers for the earlier romance books in a more realistic style and it is in that style that he did a series of one page gags for ACG's The Killroys (which also featured the Milt Gross stories I showed yesterday). This started before he joined Timely and probably went on after that. But that is not his earliest work. In a mid war issue of some oversized gag magazine, I also found a single signed cartoon by Hartley. He must have done that while in the armny or while in college, but I couldn't find any evidence of him doing cartoons after that, apart from these Komic Kapers.
From #10:
From #12:
From #13:
He went on even longer than Milt Gross, who stopped his contributions with #17 or 18.
From #19:
Apparently, he drew tthese pages all through the series, because I found a few in some of the later issues as well.
From #50:
From #50:
From #52:
From #54:
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