Number 1474: The old timer

Edgar “Ed” Wheelan is one of my favorite old-time cartoonists, and I’ve featured his funny artwork and stories several times.

Wheelan had a successful comic strip, “Minute Movies,” which appeared in newspapers during the twenties and thirties. When he went into the comic books he even revived the title for his feature in Flash Comics, one of which I’m showing here.

It’s not within the scope of this blog to feature newspaper comic strips, although I do present their comic book reprints. But I’d like to at least bring attention to Ed Wheelan’s newspaper work, which was sadly neglected after the strip ended in 1935.

There have been some attempts to reprint “Minute Movies,” including this 1977 trade paperback by Hyperion Press:

And this squarebound 40 page “graphic novel” from Malibu Graphics in 1990 doesn’t use the name “Minute Movies” on the covers, but it is a reprint of a 1934 continuity from the comic strip.

These are hard to find nowadays, but if you’re interested they are worth having.

One of the best examples of the the strip was printed in the late Woody Gelman’s Nostalgia Comics, #’s 2 and 3, in 1972. Hairy Green Eyeball posted it in his blog in 2009, and you can find the links beneath the two stories I’m showing today. “Padlock Homes” is from a series in Harvey’s Champ Comics, and is from issue #19 (1942). The “Minute Movies” episode of Jack and the Beanstalk is from Flash Comics #38 (1943).

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Parts one and two of the 1933 continuity, “Serpents of the City,” from Nostalgia Comics. Click on the pictures.






Some comics work by Wheelan featured here last January:

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Number 1459: Shelly’s Hawkman

Sheldon Moldoff did the Hawkman feature for Flash Comics as on-the-job training. He started at age 18, and like many of his peers in those early days of comic books he swiped Flash Gordon poses.

I think the artist who created the costume (Dennis Neville?) put all of the subsequent Hawkman artists in a bind, because drawing him with the hawk head and wings was difficult and unwieldy. Years later the golden age Hawkman was given a superhero mask, but those wings remained.* I think an interesting critique of the Hawkman costume** is from 2011, by a commenter going by the name “meltdownclown” for Booksteve Thompson’s Four Color Shadows blog:

“To me, the wings always looked like rugs.

The wings will always be Hawkman's big problem. Those don't-try-it-at-home-kids nightmares are anchored to the center of his back by a harness that, by rights, should carve him into quarters in the first hard crosswind. And they must be great fun in any narrow space.”

You can see the 1942 story meltdownclown was commenting on in Steve’s blog here.

My post today is from Flash Comics #38 (1943):

*The original costume, hawk head and all, was resurrected by Joe Kubert for the silver age revival.

**Considering we’re talking about a comic book character, and in comic books all rules of realism can be broken.

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Number 939


Secret City/Images of Doom


Here's a two-part Flash story from the 1940s, taken from two sources: a reprint from Flash Super-Spectacular #229 from 1974, reprinting the first part, "The Secret City," from All-Flash Comics #31, 1947, and my tear sheets of the second part, "Images of Doom," originally from Flash Comics #94, 1948.

For those of you who came in late to this blog, I've told of my box of tear sheets several times. Over 30 years ago a customer of the bookstore where I worked gave me a box of pages he'd cut from old comic books. He bought comics in the late 1940s, almost all DC, and saved only stories by artists he liked. Carmine Infantino, Joe Kubert, Lee Elias, artists working in the DC house style of the day. I had hundreds of loose pages and I reassembled the stories. As you can see, some of the pages are brittle and damaged.

Both stories were drawn by Carmine Infantino and Frank Giacoia, and written by Robert Kanigher.

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