The Fabuleous Fifties

Marvin's Mob

Friday Obtuary Extra.

Several blogs and groups toay that comic book artist Marvin Stein has died at age 85. He was a contemporary of Jack Kirby, who worked with him and Joe Simon in the fifties. After Simon and Kirby left the crime titles Justice TRaps The Guilty and Headline, Stein seems to have continued them. At least he did most of the work for those titles and several others. In the late fifties, after inking some of Jack Kirby's work, he disappeared into advertising. He worked at BBD&O, where he got work for his friend and former co-worker at Prize Mort Meskin. Steven Brower had just interviewed him for his new book on Meskin and I was looking forward to reading that, as it was the first I had heard of Mr. Stein in a long time.

Anyway, in his obituary, it is mentioned that in the mid-fifties he did a family strip with Bud Wexler (who was a major force at Johnstone and Cushing, but almost never signed his work so I could have never gotten a handle on bis style. The strip is by-lined Bud Marvin and although I had seen it, I would never have guesed it was by Stein. I will ad some of his more familiar serious work from the fifties to this post later on, so you can all see the difference, but here at least are some rarely seen samles of his later funny style (which I never knew he had).