Friday Comic Book Day.
Two stories from Stan Lee's Mad imitation comics, to celebrate the fact that the first half of my article on Mad Imitations was published in Alter Ego #86. These stories are mentioned in that article but not shown fully, as Ican do here (and in color too, even though the still available digital version of the magazine does have all of my illustrations in color).
The first one is a three page gem by Bill Everett from Riot #6. Usually Everett goed comletely over the top when he is doing satire, but here he stays very close to the original, Werner Roth's Lorna of the Jungle.
This story is one I originally took for one being done by Ros andru. It certainly does look a lot like the stuff he was producing for his own title Get Lost! But why would he contribute a story to Stan Lee's imitation if he was already busy doing his own books? At a second (or third, or fourth) look I realized it is probably the work of Mike Sekowsky, who had learned to imitate Ross (and Toth) at Standard not long before that. hat would make this Sekowsky's only contribution to the satire genre, somthing he was obviously very good at. The girl in the splash and the Tarzan figure later on in the story are much more in his own syle than in Ross's. Sekowsky is also know for not inking his own stories, so who did this job for him?
In my article I make a whole show about the question if Stan Lee wrote for these books himself and if so, how much. This seems like a story Lee did not write, as it has none of his ticks and preoccupations and the job number doesn't line up with other Stan Lee stories.
5 comments:
I think you're right that the second story is by Sekowsky; that Tarzan figure is a dead giveaway. Don't know who the inker is.
I marvel at how similar Sekowsky looks under different inkers. Having inked some of his stuff myself, I can say that while his pencils are complete, they certainly aren't "pre-inked." Yet his drawing style is so strong that the inker affects the final look much less than is the case with other pencillers.
Agreed it's Sekowsky. Certain faces and body movements give it away. It sure does look like Andru in spots though and I probably would have just assumed that was correct without looking to closely if you hadn't brought it to our attention. Great eye!
Smurfsw, I am a big admirer of Sekowsky's work and have many samples of every period. Starting with funny stuff in the forties, then doing romance (often with George Klein as an inker), going to Standard and completely changing his style (or coming into his own, at least as we know it). He was all over the place through the fifties but did some great ghost work for Gaiacoia on Sherlock Holmes and Barry on Flash Gordon. Everything he did afer that was a watered down version of these high points of the late fifties, probably including the stuff you inked. But we still want to know what it was... A
s for inkers, I have found he had two styles and probably two (or three) inkers representing those styles. There was a rough style, which you can see in Captain Flash and other strips he did for Sterling and his slick style, which included most of his work for Stan Lee (but not all of it). I hope to get into that some time later.
None of the work I inked appeared in the US. It was for a line of Hanna-Barbera strips edited here (in the late 70s? Early 80s?) by Mark Evanier and destined for publication in France. A lot of interesting people worked on those strips.
I inked several 8-page "Mightor" and "Wonder Wheels" stories which Mike penciled. I never met Sekowsky in person.
We shuld get some of these HB comic together and show some of them. My gess is, Steve ditko did some work for them as well..? I will ad the covers Daan Jippes did for the Dutch HB books. Yet another sample of his incredible talent at mimicry. Here in Holland, the Tooder studio's did a lot of HB wok as well as stories for the Dutch Disney Weekly, Donald Duck.
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