Saturday Leftover Day.
I love art spotting and I seem to have a knack for it. The last month, I have been adding data to the Grand Comicbook Database and it's been great fun. Among my best finds was a number of stories don eby Gene Colan for Quality in the early fifties. Colan started working for Stan Lee at Timely in the late forties. After the bullpen was disbanded in late 1949, all rtists were sent home to work from there. This was in fact a great boon for most of their styles, since this is the point everyone (and not just the E artists) in the business started to develope his own style. Colan worked for a couple of companies, including Quality and returned to Stan Lee and Timely (now often called Atlas) to do a nhuge number of war and horror stories. So many, that most people assume he did not do outside work, until he was hired by DC to start there. But what I found was, that not only did his work for Quality overlap with his return to Atlas, he actually must have continued woking for them. The stories I have come across come from 1953 and 1955 as well as earlier. Since he did not ink these himself, they look quite different from the work he was doing for Stan Lee, but there is no doubt in my mind that these samples are pure Colan. In fact, I think these quality stories might provide the link to his work for DC, which took over many of Qualties artists and some of the titles, when they folded in 1955. Thankfully the guy who did the scans has added his own guesses to his scans and on two of these he guessed they were by Colan as well. I showed some of these rare Colan stories earlier and here are three more. I will keep adding new find to the GCD, but with the latest one from 1955 I know that the list won't be ready until w have seen every Quality book...
I found two more and couldn't resist adding them...
And I added three more... skipping two that were already noted in the GCD.
After the colan stories, I have one more for the art spotters. It is a story by an unknown artist done in a style which was very much influencd by the later work of Milton Caniff. As far as I'm concerned all the usual suspects are off: Ray Bailey, Lee Elias, Bill Overguard, even Carmine Infantino or Irwin Hasen. So who is this artist, who draws such destinctive fat lips on all his caracters?
7 comments:
Interesting stuff by Colan. Nice. About the last story. There IS an distinctive touch of Elias - but if you can't identify it, who will?!
Just wild guessing now, but maybe it will trigger you to something more helpful.
Partly reminds me of the artwork in Mister Mistery #1 "Television Ghost", credited to a certain Charles Stern (Kurtzman lookalike), later billed to Mike Esposito, I believe.
The splashpage however looks like Gillmor hack Eugene Hughes might have had added some brushstrokes.
Back to you, Ger.
I think it was me who finally dentified the Television Ghost story as being by Ross Andru (probably with Mike Esposito). See my post for the 'evidence'.
I believe that what you see as a touch of Lee Elias, is in fact the resemblance to the work of Caniff - on Stev Canyon, mind you, because I don't think he used the variation on lighter and heavier lines in the faces as much in his Terry years.
The only artist coming close to this particular style is Ray Bailey, but there are two things standing in the way. First of all the date of this book, as Bailey was too busy in the early fifties with his own newspaper strips and secondly those odd, almost obsessive broad lips on some on the characters. I have never seen anyone do that before. Is there a Caniff inker I don't know about?
What I have seen of Stern's work doe not lok like Kurtzman's work, by the way. That was just invented because he had worked with Kurtzman in the late forties and a name was needed to explain Television Ghost.
This is all very true. I apologize for my wild guesses, but it's fun speculating about these kind of things.
I gotta figure that the last page has been omitted from “Some Call It Madness”.
Dick Briefer?
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