The Fabuleous Fifties

Golden Lads

Sunday Meskin Measures.

And a new signed Mort Meskin page! See below.

With Action Comics #121 or #122 Meskin return to the Vigilante. The change is his style is fenomenal. We see the same shift in style in his work on the Vigilante stories in Western Comics and soon after this, he starts doing stories for Standard's Black Terror and Fighting Yank with Jerry Robinson. Meskin had appeared with Robinson in Golden Lad and Atoman, but they had never worked together (although he may have inked some of Robnson's stories according to the GCD) and specificl what their working style was, is never clear. Much of what they did on the Standard books looks as if Meskin could have done it on his own... only it is better. I think looking at the stories chronologically and comparing them to what was going on in his other series, Johnny Wuick, at te same time, we can conclude that most of the time Robinson refined Meskin's pencils. And althoug the credits in the GCD vary when they didn't sign together and put it down as Robinson on pencils and Meskin on inks, this division with Meskin laying out, Robinson refining and Meskin inking is at work here as well.

Whatever the specific division of labor, the GCD gets it wrong here. Not all of it. The Vigilante story in #120 is credited to George Roussos and that seems right. This story is typical of his style, it makes me wonder why he didn't sign it. The story in #121 I haven't got, but it is credited to Robinson and Roussos. I have a strong suspicion it will be by Robinson and Meskin (which should be obvious at the first glance if it is). They then have the story we see here as being done by Roussos, but it is as typically a Robinson and Meskin collaboration ad can be found. More the next weeks.

From roughly the same period, maybe slightly earlier, comes what may be the first true collaboration of Meskin and Robinson. Although the 15 page story from Western Fighters #2 is credited to meskin solo, I see a lot of detail that only appeared in his work when he started working with Jerry Robinson. Look the fleeing crowd on the splash page or the first panel of page four. The old Mort Meskin would have found a less detailed way of drawing this. At the same time, if you look ate the second panel on page one of the whole of page two, there is a lot of George Roussos there as well. So Meskin on lay-out, Robinson on pencils and Roussos inking, with all of them chipping in where they could?





























Hm, looks like Roussos, I thought while loking at a filler page from Jet Fighters #7 from Standard. I scrolled down and saw the signature. Mort. He did do fillers for them in the early fifties, including one for Out of the Shadows. Most of these have been catalogued, but this one not yet.