THE HUNT FOR A CUBAN MASTER

 Wednesday Return.

Manhunt is an interesting magazine, because it used Matt Baker illustrations in it's first few years. But even after that the St. John published crime digest used comic book illustrators like Ric Estrada and Tony Talliarco. They all worked in the same scratchy house style, but luckily most of the art was signed.

I am particulary interested in the illustrations by Ric Estrada, who started out at EC in the fifties and ended up at DC in the sixties. Little is know about what he did in between, but doing my book Behaving Madly I did find that he drew about one third of the first two issues of Mad magazine imitator Frantic.

As I wrote myself on his wikipedia page: "After that he moved to Germany, where he stayed for three years. He did political cartoons for the Spandauer Volksblatt in the morning and did storyboards for the advertising company Deutsche Dokumentar- und Werbefilm GmbH in the afternoons." A trip to the Berlin Public Library (where volumes of the Spandauer Voksblatt are kept) didn't yield anything - because it took me a day to get registered and I didn't have time to stick around for the volumes to be brought down. But I will return and I will find these illustrations. The first time I saw his work in a crime digest was for the Alfred Hitchcock magazine, so I was not surprised to see him in Manhunt as well.