Before The Fact

Sunday Al Williamson Surprise. 

Today I do not only have a new Al Williamson story written by Stan Lee (from Gunsmoke Western #35), but also two other Stan Le written stories from that same issues with two other great artists, Jerry Robinson and Gene Colan. So you can see for yourself how he chose each story for the most suited artist.

In Jerry Robinson's case, it wouldn't surprise me if he allowed the artist to create his own splash panel as an easy way to make some more money (for the artist and himself), which is what he did with Gene Colan later on as well. In fact, if that's the case, these extra splash pages with added dialogue may be the first instance of what would later become the Marvel Method of dialoguing after the pages had been designed.

Dark Delicacy

Friday Comic Book Day.

This summer I am selling all of my collection of Timely/Atlas war comcis. I have been selling the 70% complete set (compiled ten years ago when I was helping the Atlas Tales website with it's lists) from last year, but the number of war books in the collecion is so big that I am not even halfway through. I am most complete in the early years of the Korean war, 1951/1953, when these books were at their best. Here is a samples from one of the books I sold last week. A great Gene Colan story, that shows the quality of the Atlas books as compared to the war comics done by Quality and DC - most notably that on the while the Quality and DC books are always set during the daytime and for the Atlas books artists such as Russ Heath and Gene Colan were allowed to do dark an dirty work. It also shows one of the problems of Colan's work all through the fifties. Because of his shaded pencil style and his impressionistic inking, many of his stories were hard to color. If tehre is an amateur coloris out there, I would love to provide you with black and white samples of Colan's work that would form a challange but I am sure will look a lot better if it is colored to today's standards.

Calling All Fans

Friday Comic Book Day.

I have said it before and I will say it again. Marvel and DC are sitting on treasure troves of comic book art from the forties and sixties. In this period most books were of the anthology style, each containing many shorter stories. In the forties, this meant that many new heroes could be tried out - a great deal of which have survived over the decades. In the late forties and fifties, when hero comics made way for genre books, whole issues were filled with stories about characters which could not be picked up in later books (the occasional Groot notwithstanding). In many cases these stories represent the best artwork of certain artist. Our view of their career is colored by what is reprinted and not by what they drew. Artists such as Gene Colan, George Tuska, Joe Sinnott, Dick Ayers, Don Heck, Paul Reinman, Bob Powell and many, many others are often misrepresented in books about their work, just because not everyone has every comic ever published and those from Marvel and DC have the extra problem of being worth a lot of money - especially if there happens to be a very collectable superhero story in the same book (something that especially counts for the late forties DC books). Of course these companies have tried their own reprint series, but both tried to rely on the know to sell the unknonw. In DC's case, this meant that most of their reprint books were character based, collectingall of Wonder Woman from her various comics, but none of the seperate stories by artists such as Carmine Infantino, Irwin Hasen or Bernie Krigstein from the same books. Marvel tried to reprint whole books or lines, but that meant they had to choose series that have a few duds as possible. Neither have tried doing it the Craig Yoe way, the whose IDW imprint Yoe Books has books that are selected either by aris, by genre or by sunject. Now that all reprint series from Marvel and DC have been cancelled I suggest they open their library to Craig and have him do his type of books for them. Horror collections with only the best stories by the best artists, overview books of the careers of Gene Colan or Russ Heath or Carmine Infantino or even Henry Boltinoff or subject related books, such as a reprint of historical stories from Marvel's war books from the fifties. So that we can have more of this:

Howdie Pardner

Friday Comic Book Day.

Toward the end of the fifties Stan Lee was writing a lot of western stories. Plotwise they were not very much, but they did have his distinct voice. And they had the benefit of often having the best artsts and the best splash pages. A selection. Some of these books I am actually selling on Ebay.