Saturday, March 29, 2014

A Genius Under Any Name

Saturday Leftover Day.

As bonus to the Lee Elias' Beyond Mars Sundays I dhowed this week, here is the second of his Tommy Tomorrow books for DC's Showcase, which ilustrates what a masterful artist he was.


2 comments:

Diego Cordoba said...


Thanks, Ger!

Lee Elias has been a personal favorite of mine. To me he was the best Caniff imitator, and I even prefer Elias' inking to Caniff's.

I heard that DC won't continue their archives collections, so we will never see masterpieces like this reprinted ever again. Thankfully there are blogs like this!

Bill said...

Thanks for posting the Showcase Tommy Tomorrow stories. I remember reading several of these back in 1962-63, I would have just turned 10 years old when they came out.

I prefer to think of Lee Elias as similar art to Caniff, rather than an imitator. He worked for Caniff and perhaps had a similar art style to begin with.

I didn't like the stories originally, they were too different from the Tommy Tomorrow I knew from the pages of World's Finest. The art style was so different, and Tommy's copilot, Brent Wood, who was supposed to have been his best friend from Space Academy days, was missing. Adding Lon Vurian actually made for better stories, but as a kid I didn't accept him.

The feature did not succeed, perhaps fewer changes would have helped. I also wonder if the writer could have developed regular villians. No one in the 3issues you've posted seems likely to have been a recurring menace for Tommy and the others.

I'll look forward to more Lee Elias and Tommy. These are great fun today.

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