Seeing Purple

Sunday Al Williamson Surprise. 

ANother non western story for Al Williamson, who seems to have turned these out in a high tempo. 

Two caveats with this one. First of all, we are slowly moving into the period at Timely/Atlas when they arted reducing the cost of coloring. Instead in some sort of realis based type of coloring, they slowly moved into the more symbolic type of coloring, where who scenes or figured were given on color. That must have saved  lot of time. To kep the idea of richness, the colorist started using more seundairy colors (orangle, purlple and green), which - because they are a mixture of two prime colors) give the impressiong of a richer palette than it actually is. All comic book scolars know, this is also the same pirod that Marie Severin started at Timely/Atlas. The was know for using whole swatches of color to obscure scenes htta she thought were objectionable. Because of her reputation as an EC coloris and her later importance for Marvel as an artist and cover designer,  she reached a sort of holy status, but I wonder is she was responsible for the coloring style in this period - which for me is horrible and obliterates the beauty of some of the art. With stories like these, I would love to see how they looked when they are colored in a less implistic way. Anyone who wants tio give it a trym ask me for black and white scans.

Secondly, I am not sure if this stoy is pure Williamson. Though clearly his, he didn;t sign it - which means an inker may have ben involved. Personally I get a whiff of George Evans (who later also took over Agent X9 from Williamson).