Hits and Mrs.

Sunday Repeating Day.

The Sunday pages of Stan Lee and Joe Maneely's Mrs. Lyon's Cubs are very hard to come by. For my article in Alter Ego #150 I had to borrow a couple of coor scans fro Michael Vassallo, who is luck te have a few. Last yera I found an onlibe source for the microfiche version, in bacl and white.

Stan Lee Told You To Get this

Tuesday Comic Strip Day.

This week Roy Thomas published Alter Ego #150, a tribute to Stan Lee at his 95th birthday later this month. As the cover piece he used my 32 page article about Stan Lee's efforts to get out of comics between 1956 and 1962. Using the correspondence with his agent Toni Mendez, I managed to track down all of his projects in that period - from the slightly unknown (like his newspaper strips Mrs. Lyons' Cubs and Willie Lumpkin) to the almost unknow (like his selfpublished books Blushing Blurbs and Golfer's Anonymous to some that were downtight unknown (like his two efforts with Vince Colletta and a third selfpublished book from 1962. Every project has some new facts and often some new and rarely seen illustrations. But since roy had to cram everything into an already crowded issue, he could only show bits and pieces of everything. Like these three samples of Barney's Beat, a precursor to Willie Lumpkin he did with Dan DeCarlo. I knew Bill Morisson had already shown two of these gags in his book on Dan DeCarlo (still available on Ebay) so I asked him if he had any more and he send me these three, complete with commentary by DeCarlo on the third one. This is the first time they are shown to the world. Come back in the next few days to see more of the unused goodies. The issue of Alter Ego can be bought on the website of publisher Twomorrows. They also do digital single issues and subscriptions, so there is no excuse not to get it.

Man Oh Man

Friday Comic Book Day.

In the second week of December Alter Ego #150 will be available in shops and as a download from the website of it's publisher Twomorrows. It's a special issue celebrating the 95th birthday of Stan Lee. Not only does it have a new and rare interview with The Man himself, there is also a huge article by me about Stan's efforts to get out of comics between 1956 and 1962. It is based in part on his correspondence with his agent Toni Mendez, which has been at Ohio State University for about thirty years. I could not use any actual quotes from many of the correspondence, but I paraphrased averything that was important. And Stan himself gave us permission to use his own letters, as well as a report hij wife Joan did for his newspaper strip Mrs. Lyons' Cubs. The history of that strip, as well as Willie Lumpkin is described in the article, with many new art samples from various different sources. There are also samples of newspaper strips that did not make it, including the synopsis of a soap opera strip Stan tried to do with Vince Colletta. And to top it all, I found an unknown selfpublished book at yet another university.

Stan's partner in Mrs. Lyons' Cubs was Joe Maneely, who like Stan was trying to find new jobs when all around them the comic industry seemed to collapse. Here is one of the few stories Joe Maneely did for DC, not long before he accidentally fell of a commuter train between New York and Philadelphia and died far to young. Stan tried to continue Mrs. Lyons with Al Hartley, but that never really got off the ground.

The Part Of The Chicken No One Uses

Tuesday Comic Strip Day.

On June 7 1958 Joe Maneely died. Still in his thirties, he was one of the greatest artists of the fifties. He mostly worked for Stan Lee's Atlas comic (actually it was Martin Goodman's Atlas comics, where Stan Lee only worked as the editor in chief, but it's the best way to work in his name). Only at the end of his career, when Atlas had to close shop for a couple of months in 1957 and rebuilt the company in a smaller fashion, he looked for (and easily found) other work at Charlton and DC. He worked in all genres fashionable in the fifties - westerns, horror, romance, war, kids humor... he even did Mad style parodies for Stan Lee's Mad imitations Crazy, Riot, Wild and Snafu and had started work for the new kid on the block, Cracked when he fell between two commuter trains on that fateful Saturday evening at the end of the decade. He was Stan Lee's favorite artist before Jack Kirby came along and Stan said about him 'he could have been another Kirby, if he hadn't died'. I don't believe that. For one, I don't think Kirby would have looked up Stan Lee if it wasn't for Joe Maneely leaving a hole in Stan's line-up. But more importantly, I don't think Joe Maneely was a superhero artist. He could do any genre, yes. But superheroes were never his thing and if he was around when Martin Goodman asked for something to compete with DC's success in that genre, I doubt that Joe Maneely would have been the one to come up with anything new and spectacular (such as Kirby and Ditko did). Also, towards the end of his career he was starting to have more and more success with a quick and easy cartoon style and I believe that like any artist of his generation he would have gone with that if he had the chance. Easier to draw means more product and more product means more money for your family. He would have gone on from Cracked or he would have continued in the style of the newspaper strip he had started with Stan Lee a couple of months earlier, Mrs. Lyon's Cubs. Okay, it was not a success yet and but it might have become one. And if not, he would have tried again, just like Stan did with Dan DeCarlo. Mrs. Lyon's Cubs may not have been the best thing Joe Maneely ever did (for me that would be his work for Snafu, which I hope to share with you soon) but it sure was the pinnacle of his career.

Sadly color copies of Joe Maneely's Sunday (easily the best part of that strip) are rarer then a collection of hen's teeth. All I have is a couple of black and white ones, some of which I can't even share (because they come from a copyright guarded collection). But here is one. I think it is worth the build-up.

What A Piece Of Work Was Joe

Tuesday Comics Strip Day.

For an article on Stan Lee's efforts to get out of comics between 1956 and 1962 I looked again at his and Joe Maneely's 1958 newspaper strip Mrs. Lyons' Cubs. When it was running only a month or so, Joe Maneely lost his life in a tragic commuter train accident in june of that same year. Apparently he had created a huge backlog, because new strips by his successor Al Hartley hdidn't appear until early September. By thenm Stan Lee had already chaged the strip to focus more on the ids. Too bad, because the early ones, where the father and mother were stil aroun dmore frequently, are the best of the lot.

Scout's Horror

Saturday Leftover Day.

Among thee new scans I have been making, is one of the Stan Lee/Al Hartley version of Mrs/ Lyon's Cubs, by then sometimes also known as Cub Scouts. This strip wa set up by Stan Lee and Joe Maneely to sell to smal any city that has cub scouts. Stan Lee tried to allign himself with the American Scouting association and although that seemed to go well, it did not result in a huge amount of papers. Still, there wa enough to start running. Then, after a couple of months Joe Maneely died and the strip was taken over by Al Hartley. Although Hartley was a prett good artist in his own right, he (and Lee, I guess) dcided t dumb down the strip and concentrate more on the kids and less on the parent's home life. With that and the beautiful Joe Maneely art gone the strip died a quick and early dead.

I have found a lot of background correcspondence on this strip and would love to feature it in an article, but sadly I have never seen actual printed Sunday art from either the Maneely or teh Hartley version. There are a couple of Sunday originals going around (most of them ending up with Joe Maneely expert Michael Vassello) and they show that that is where the srip was at it's best. So to find a sigle Hartley Sunday was a big thing... no for the other forty or fifty to turn up.

Watch This Space

Tuesday Confession Day.

For seven years I have upload stuff to this blog daily. These weeks things have been slowing down. In fact, the lag is so big it's starting to become a problem. The reason is of course I have been busy. But not in the way you may think. The real reason I have fallen behind in adding posts is the fact that my scanner broke down last year and I have been putting of getting a new one - since it would including having to buy a new printer, computer, several programs, to bring the whole thing up to speed. One won't work without the other, etc. And since work is going on alongside this blogging thing, I have slowly run out of material. Well, not material, as you can see from the photo I uploaded, but scanned material.

I hope you will bear with me while I try to sort out this problem and after that I will shwer you with my trademark extra special stuff, self canned and in full color. Drop by every now and then. I will add posts, but you'll know when I get started for real again.

Say It Ain't So, Joe

Tuesday Comic Strip Day.

Mrs. Lyon's Cubs is one of the great hard to find short running strips of the late fifties. Written by Stan Lee and initially drwn by the incomparable Joe Maneely, it has long been a sort of holy grail for my collecting efforts. To my surprise a long run of The Milwaukee Gazette was resently added to Google Newspapers and in it I found almost all of the run of this strip. Not quite, since a few papers were missing, including sadly most of the Sundays. But all in all what I found does give a nice overview of this not so very funny, but certainly interesting strip.

In the late fifties Stan Lee everything he could to get out of comics. Well, everything except quit his job at his uncle once removed Martin Goodman's company that was then mostly known by the name of it's failed distribution branch, Atlas. He tried his hand at funny book proposals, newspaper panels and newsppaer strips. Until finally, one day in 1957 one of them stuck. It was a preposal for a comedy strip with a niche market appeal. Mrs. Lyon's Cubs was to be about a scouting mom and her boys (and their friends). Lee hoped to sell the strip with an official scouting connection and it would have worked if only for the fact that the scouting people weren't that interested and the newspapers didn't really think it was something they needed. Still, attractively drawn by Joe Maneely, who had long been Stan Lee's favorite artist in the Atlas stable the managed to snatch a syndicate and enough papers to get the strip going. It started in februari 1958 with a daily and a Sunday. A rare thing, but the quality of Joe Maneely's drawing may have had somethin got do with that.

Unfortunately in on june 7 1958, after going out for the night (with oldtime friends John Severin and Walt Kelly assistant George Ward) he stepped out on the balcony of the train to get some air, fell between two trains and died. For a long time the story was that he had been drunk, but according to Dan Goldberg he had lost his glasses earlier that week and that may have been a contributing factor. I fully expect that Michael Vasello's new upcoming biography of Maneely (which was done with the help and artistic treasure troves of the family) will give the full story. The art chores on Mr. Lyon's Cubs were taken over by Al Hartley in a strangely subdued style. This changeover didn't occur until the beginning of july, with the Joe Maneely Sunday pages running even a bit longer. The strip continued until the end of August, when it was cancelled, making it the shortest of Stan Lee's comic strip efforts - but not by much. His 1970's photo strip Says Who ran for a similarly short period.