Sunday, April 12, 2015

A Walk On The Heath

Friday Comic Book Day.

Like many of you I am a fan of the work of Russ Heath. But I think it was never better than when he worked for Stan Lee at Atlas, doing all genres. When he moved to DC to become one of their peeminent war stories his slickness works against him for me, as if he is selling the war as a glamourous thing. For me he was at his best using the style for satire (such as in the National Lampoon, where it almost became a parody of the squeeky clean comics of the previous decades), the war covers he did for Atlas (always more dark and brutal than those for DC) and the horror stories he did in the early fifties, such as these four from the first twenty issues of Journey Into Mystery. He also had a great funny style, he used for many of the Mad magazine imitations of the late fifties, but I'll come back to that later.

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