Sunday, October 24, 2021

Not Who We Think It Is

Sunday Al Williamson Surprise. 

Another nugget from the mountain of gold that is Timely-Atlas. This story is from Strange Tales of the Unusual #3 and it is signed by Williamson without Stan Lee. Atlastales.com gives the art credits to Williamson on pencils and Gray Morrow on inks. And that could be true. I have to confess that I am not too familiar with Al Williamson's actual style. It is much easier to recognize his inking habits (and unique texture tricks). This story does not seem to have a lot of the latter, which doesn't mean it has to be by Morrow. The inking looks just as much like Angelo Torres' work to me, but there are elements that remind me of Gray Morrow, such as the use of ben day in the backgrounds. As for the lack of Stan Lee signature, this story does have one of his trademark writing ticks: as I have said before Stan Lee never ever wrote 'through'. Up from his first work in the forties uop to his private mails in the last decade. Instead he always uses 'thru'. That is very little to go on. Nor the fact that the 'twist' of this story is typical Stan Lee fair - since other used those as well. But that is more a disqualifier than something to ID him with. This story also does not fall in a run of Stan Lee written stories and he always used to write in bunches, so I am going for 'not by Stan Lee, possibly opening caption rewritten).


 

1 comment:

Alex Jay said...

It says Al Williamson on page one at the bottom of the third panel in the green shrubbery.