The Fabuleous Fifties

Nobody Expects the Unexpected

Saturday Leftover Day.

Today some more pages from the early run of DC's Tales of the Unpexpected.

For my new friend Bob Bailey I have an early Mort Drucker story. As you can see, he put a little more effort into it. Some of his later work for DC can look quite rushed. Effective, but rushed. The story is from Tales of the Unespected #3 and the half page filler may be a reprint from the batch he did when he started out at DC, but in this form it's from TotU#4. You can see a surprising similarity to Kubert's work in these fillers.









Here's another story attributed to Leonard Starr by the Grand Comic Book Database, this time from Tales of the Unexpected. Apparently he did the cover as well. Unfortunately the one from my copy was quite damaged.









And finally, the first story Mort Meskin did for this title. I'll have two more tomorrow and will try to find out where they fit into his career, but generally speaking I know he starte dout doing war stories for Bob Khaniger and when that didn't work out, he shifted to Julius Schwartz, who used him for quite a few years on his sf-books (although sf at that time seems to have stood for soft fiction).

Although he had already done stories on his own for DC, this stiry was done with Bill Draud on pencils, with whom he had worked at Prize (but never together for as far as I know). It is known that Meskin sometimes used other artists to overcome his nervousness about the blank page. In some stories it is said he had someone doodle something on a blank page, just to make it easier for him to start. But on many occasions he seems to have worked with pencillers as well, weather it was George Roussos, Joe Kubert or on this occasion Bill Draut. The result is very pretty and it is too bad they didn't do more together.