You Make Me Feel Brand New

Sunday Leftover Day.

Two more amazing early Mort Meskin stories for DC. Stylisticly, these stories bear no resemblance to the work he was doing for Prize at that time. Clearly, he was looking for a more commercial upmarket style.

From Tales of the Unexpected #3:







From Tales of the Unexpected #8:

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.

Comic Books Gone Wild

Friday Comic Book Day

Today a couple of comic book stories from artists that were featured in my blog this week. First a story by Leonard Starr from Taes of the Unexpected #4. According to the Grand Comicbook Database, there was a Starr story in #2 as well, but this one look more easily recognizable to me. The line-up of those early Unexpected comics was quite good ad I will be showing soem mre tomorrow.








Secondly, here is a story by George Tuska from the same period he started working on the Scorchy Smith strip I showed here this week. The story is so-so, but artisicly this recently deceased artist was at the peak of his abillities here.

From Wild Western #32:







While loking for these stories, I came across a later unsigned page in Unexpected #118 by Tuska. What a journey that man made in his career.



As a bonus, I have another of those Timely stories that were draw by Al Gordon and seem to have been inked by Joe Kubert. After leaving St. John and before finding permanent emplymnt at DC, Joe Kubert did a few jobs for Stan Lee. The first few of those were inking artist Al Gordon. Gordon was an older artist, about whom I know very little. Kubert all but obliterated him on some stories, while leavind him his own style on others. First I wondered of Kubert couldn't have been a pupil of friend of Kubert, who was helped along in a difficult time. But recently I read that Kubert doesn't doesn't remember working with his co-artst of the second run of stories for Stan Lee. For those stories the responsibillities were switched. Kubert did the pencilling and Sam Moskowitz did the inking. Moskowitz is an artist who like Gordon disappeared after turning up a few times in the late fifties. If Kubert didn't work with Moscowitz (or Gordon for that matter) it is more logocal to assume that he was assigned these jobs by Stan Lee, who must have found that Gordon could use a good inker in the first case and Moskowitz couldn't hurt Kubert in the second.

From Wild Western #34: