The Fabuleous Fifties

When Adventure Was King

Sunday Meskin Mania

Over on the Yahoo Meskin Group, Steven has announced the publication of the Mort Meskin biography. I expect great things from it. If you haven't preorderd it from Diamond, I would like to do an experiment. Let's wait until it arrives and then all order it on the same day from Amazon. See if it jumps up in the sales charts, even for one day. Anyway, here's Steven's announcement:

"The book "FROM SHADOW TO LIGHT: The Life and Art of Mort
Meskin" is finally off to the printer. A September pub date is listed on Amazon
but as far as I know Fantagraphics is trying to get it out for San Diego. The
book is 220 pages with over 200 illustrations, comic art, advertising art,
personal art, photos. Great news is I was able to show lots of DC work, starting
in the 40s right through the 60s. I believe it is going to be a beautiful book
and will go a long way towards setting the record straight about Mort, including
his influence on comic book art and storytelling. There are never before
published quotes form a myriad of artists, Kubert, Infantino, Starr, Stein,
Olesen, Steranko, Simon and even Roussos and Kirby.

The book has an introduction by Jerry Robinson, and was done under the auspices
of Mort's sons, Peter and Philip. There are many list members here who's help
was invaluable, too numerous to mention, but I want to cite Dylan Williams for
his incredible generosity in sharing his own research and resources.

The big news is that we are in discussions with Fantagraphics to do a reprint
book. I will post more info as soon as I know.

I have updated the check list extensively, based on first hand verification. I
want to clean it up a bit, and will post it in the files section later. I'm
guessing it will be included in the reprint book."

I hope the 'best of' collection will materialize, but they will have a hard time selecting stories. Here's a suggestion: why not commision several essays by certain people about different perios of Mort Mekin's career and use those as a basis for the choices. So there would be one or two appreciations of his early DC work, maybe one by Joe Kubert, one by Alex Toth (which can be found on The Annotated Toth website), one by Carmine Infantino. A good piece about his work on The Black Terror and Fighting Yank (maybe by Jim Steranko), something about his Timely years (Mike Vasallo seems the obvious chouce) and I would love to pick a few DC stories and write about them.

Meskin did good work and uninspired work in all phases of his career. The odd thing is that they aren't confined to periods. Here are three stories from three different years of My Greatest Adventure. In my eye, the middle one is the weakest. So there wasn't a stedy decline, as is sometimes suggested.

From My Greatest Adventure #12:









From My Greatest Adevnture #32:









From My Greatest Adventure #56: