Why Solvit?

Monday Surprise Day.

I promised you something you have never seen every Monday, so here we go.

Today's contribution is small, but a lot of fun. In the late fifties Carl Burgos became a free lance magazine editor after having been let go by Martin Goodman when their Timley imperium (temporarly) collapsed. He drew a lot of free lance stuff (including some illustrations for one of Timely's western digest pulp westerns) and ended up spearheading the Mad magazine imitation Zany. Zany was started by Bob Sproul, who only a couple of month later started asimilar magazine with another former Timely employee Sol Brodsky, called Cracked. In my book Behaving Madly, I try and go into the reasons why Zany failed where Cracked succeeded, when both magazine used so many of the same artists.

So somewhere along that Carl Burgos also edited a men's crime magazine, which is to say: a crime magazine that had the look and feel of a men's magazine. Like those men's magazines, Burgos used a lot of artists to illustrate his stories, among them Paul Rinman and John Severin - bot of whom also worked for Zany and Cracked. In the first issue I have (and the only one I have ever seen) I have found no evidence Bob Sproul was involved, but it wouldn't surprise me.

Bot Reinman and Severin did a couple of illustrations (which I may show later) but the best part of this issue for me, is the illustrated WHo Dunnit page by Severin. I love this genre, in comics, in magazines, in books and on televsision, probably from the first time I saw it use din the old Elley Queen show. I even used it in the first story of my own detective comic strip Hilary King. Can you find out what happened? I will post the solution tomorrow.

As promised. I will answer the solution below

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