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.

Matt Art

Monday Illustration Day.

Like many of his contemporaries, African-American comic book artist Matt Baker made a move to other types of jobs. The comic industry was growing smaller every month and jobs were harder to come by and paid less and less. Always a great illustrator, he tried his hand at magazine illustration. He was lucky in the fact that the publisher for whom he did the most of his comic book work, also had a sideline in magazines. And although I do not know if Baker's first magazine illustrations appeared in St. John magazines, he did do a lot of them, both for Nugget (a Playboy wannabe) and Manhunt (an Ellery Queen Alfred Hitchcock digest magazine wannabe).specially Manhunt is a rare treat. For the first few issues he did an opening illustration for every story. A couple of years ago I shared everything I had from #2. Here are the 12 illustrations he did for #3.

I'm Back

Wednesday Catching Up Day.

The computer I use to do this blog is at the shop, but I have highjacked my wife's computer to give you a little something to celebrate the fact that I am back and will be posting daily again from now on.

Matt Baker is an African-American comic book artist, who has recieved quite a bit of attention recently. He worked in the forties and fifties and died too young at the end of the decade (or maybe just into the sixties, I can't remember). He was a good girl artist, who is loved by many comic book geeks. But he also did other stuff, such as the illustrations for the early issues of the St. John detective pulp Manhunt. St. John was a publisher who also used baker on his romance comics, so the link is natural. I have several of these issues from the first year and scanned in the first page of most illustrations. Baker was very suited for this type of work, but after a couple of issues the editors started using different illustrators and although Baker did return sometimes for a single spot, he was never as invoilved as in the first few. The illustratrions are not signed, but Baker's style is unmistakable, except on the small one with the boat. But if he did the rest, he would have done that one as well.

Baker also drew a short-lived comic strip called Flamengo, to which I will return later this week.