Number 1528: Phantom Lady “just doodly do it...”

I googled the lyrics the chorus girls are singing on page 6 of this Phantom Lady story, and came up with a 1924 song called “Doodle-Doo-Doo” sung by Eddie Cantor. Isn’t the Internet amazing?*

The story is also amazing, if not for the plot but for the Matt Baker pretty girl artwork. For you connoisseurs of such things there is a lingerie panel and also a panel of Phantom Lady tied up. I, being a comic book historian, am more interested in the story in its historic context and avert my eyes at such pandering to the pin-up crowd of the 1940s. (Ha. You are right not to believe that. The great thing about this sort of artwork is that it looks just as sexy as it did when it was drawn 66 years ago.)

From Phantom Lady #16 (1948):

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*I also found a YouTube video of Eddie Cantor singing the other song on the page, “I Faw Down and Go Boom”.

Here's another Phantom Lady story, with a bonus Blue Beetle story, I showed in 2011:

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Number 1304: Headlights on full beam

With the 1948 cover of Phantom Lady #17, artist Matt Baker helped give us comic book fans a code word we've used now for decades: “headlights”. It happened when Dr. Fredric Wertham, M.D., published his book, Seduction of the Innocent, which pointed out how murder, crime and sexual perversion were all part of the comic books kids loved. Wertham used the cover to point out that children called big breasts on comic book women “headlights”. (This page has been razored out of some of copies of SOTI I've seen. By headlights fans, no doubt.)

I've pointed out before that Wertham’s book is a good example of the Law of Unintended Consequences. It was used at the time to condemn comic books, but is used now to identify comics that belong on a special list of desirable collectibles. Interior art on this story is also by Matt Baker, and the whole issue was prepared by the Jerry Iger comic book shop, where Baker was a star. The publisher was Victor Fox, and the blobby printing was by some fast and dirty web press printing company of the 1940s, which didn't care that they were printing one of the most iconic covers and collectible comic books of all time.

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Number 1224: For the boys in the band, groupies never come first

Gals, here's a cautionary tale from Teen-Age Romances #17 (1951). It's about a girl who falls for a musician. Even in the days before rock 'n' roll there were chicks falling all over guys in a band. Young Martha, who thought she was only one, found out she was one of many. Tsk, tsk.

Dana Dutch is credited with the story. John Benson's excellent book, Romance Without Tears (Fantagraphics, 2003), is a collection of stories for St. John by Dutch, which the cover blurb for Benson's book calls “’50s Love Comics — With a Twist!” And we don't mean the twist as in Chubby Checker.

This book is still available from Amazon.com, and gets my highest recommendation.

The stories I'm posting today are not included in the book.

Matt Baker did the gorgeous artwork on the cover and for “Secret Love Made Me An Exile.”

Dutch and Baker also collaborated on “I Was Hurt By Love” in the same issue. All I can say about that is, who the hell hasn't been hurt by love?

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Number 1098


The crimes of Matt Baker


After leaving the Iger shop where he had toiled on such features as the leggy Sky Girl, Matt Baker used a more sophisticated illustrative technique. When he went to St. John his artwork was just as recognizable and his girls as pretty, but not in the pin-up style of Fiction House. These two stories from 1950's Authentic Police Cases #10 are examples.

Of the two, the Canadian Mountie story, "The Case Of the Red Bearded Rogue," gives him more room for drawing. "Midwest Cops Smash the Crimson Gang" is written like a radio script with a lot of narration and dialogue, almost crowding his artwork off the page. He pulled it off, though. In the case of that story the real crime in this crime comic is over-writing.

Credit is given by comic book art expert Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr., to Baker alone for "Rogue" and for "Crimson Gang" pencils only, with inks by Ray Osrin.

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