Number 188

The Not-Quite-Kelly


Howie Post is one of those comic artists who worked in the business for so many years his work is everywhere. This particular strip, from DC's Animal Antics* #9, July-August 1947, was drawn when Post was only 21 years old, based on his birth year of 1926. He started in comics when he was still in his teens, not as young as Joe Kubert or Frank Frazetta, but still a prodigy, as far as I'm concerned.

In his later career Post did a daily syndicated comic strip called The Dropouts, and Harvey Comics are filled with his pages, mostly in Hot Stuff. The Little Devil and Spooky, The Tuff Little Ghost. He has a very appealing style, full of action and humor, as this page from a 1976 issue of Hot Stuff shows.

Post's early art was inspired by Walt Kelly. According to Post he met with Kelly and comic book packager Oscar Lebeck about doing work for them. His method of inking and penciling was inspired by Kelly, but different enough that it is wholly Post. "Presto Pete" is a funny animal magician strip. I think it's quite good. I don't know if Post wrote his own material, but it's well done. Rather than being a clone of Walt Kelly, Howie Post went on to develop his own style, instantly recognizable. That is until he invented Anthro for DC Comics in 1968, where he went from funny devils, funny ghosts and funny animals to funny cavemen.

*Post mistakenly calls Animal Antics a book he packaged for Timely (Marvel), rather than DC in his TwoMorrows interview from Comic Book Artist #5. This is the danger of interviews with artists who have fallible memories stretching back five or six decades, or even more.

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Number 187


The Waterboys

Here's something you don't see anymore: a monster story combined with Cold War jitters. "The Merman Menace" is from Forbidden Worlds #5, published by the American Comics Group, dated March-April, 1952. The writer is unknown, but according to the Grand Comics Database, the artist is Lin Streeter, about whom I know little. About all I could learn about Streeter is that he was active in comics from the early '40s until at least the 1950s.

You've gotta love having a monster pumped full of adrenalin and benzedrine to get him back up to speed, so he can get revenge on the Reds. It's in the story, folks. I don't make this stuff up.

Just as this giant merman is a survivor of an underwater city, so is Aquaman a citizen of Atlantis. He was born of an Atlantean mom and an American dad. He can stay out of water for an hour but then he has to be submerged again. His adventures had to be short because of that hour time limit, no doubt.

I was given the DC phonebook-sized Showcase Presents Aquaman, and have enjoyed reading a story or two a night. I read Aquaman stories in Adventure Comics in the 1950s and enjoyed them then, too. Of course, at that time I didn't really discern how gimmicky the plots are. I should have, because that was DC Comics in a nutshell: all gimmicks, all the time. Something I appreciate even more than I did 50 years ago is the artwork of Ramona Fradon. Ms Fradon had an excellent semi-cartoony style, perfectly suited to the somewhat zany plots.* Her panels are full of action and her sea creatures are great. In the 1960s I liked her work on Metamorpho and in the 1970s on Super-Friends.

My favorite story (so far) in the book is "The Undersea Hospital," reprinted from Adventure Comics #262, cover-dated July 1959. In this outrageous tale Aquaman opens a "hospital" for his finny friends, splinting a broken tentacle (!) for his octopus friend, helping a dogfish who chased a catfish and got in trouble. You get the idea. At the end an outrageous story goes right off the outrageousness charts when Aquaman is shot by some bad guys. The sea creatures help him: swordfish-surgeons cut into him, and sucker fish suck out the bullets!





After a tryout in Showcase (the comic book) Aquaman got his own book and the stories went totally bonkers, as all DC Comics did, with science fiction monsters and menaces. The Aquaman artwork went from Fradon to another great artist, Nick Cardy.

The current Showcase series of volumes is bringing back all of the old DC characters, the gimmick plots, the ridiculous and stilted dialogue, just as we saw them in the 1950s and '60s. At an affordable price, too. I hope you're joining in the fun and nostalgia of these great black and white reprints.

*The editor was Mort Weisinger, who showed in Action Comics, Superman, Superboy, Jimmy Olsen, Lois Lane, etc., etc., how much mileage a comic book editor can get out of a few gimmicks. The writer on most of the Aquaman stories in Adventure Comics was Robert Bernstein, probably best known amongst Golden Age fans as writer of Psychoanalysis for EC Comics' New Direction. Apparently Bernstein had psychological problems, had psychoanalysis, and elements of it pop up even in the Aquaman stories.

It's a bonus! If you've read this far then you deserve a treat. I'm enclosing an extra story about another famous half-fish, half-human hero. The story is from the late 1940s, and was part of the box full of comic book tear sheets I received years ago. I went through and assembled the complete stories, of which this is one. Comic title unknown, by a writer and artist unknown. (See note by reader Darci below.)

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Number 186

When Rick Griffin Was In Drag

When people think of artist Rick Griffin, they think of his psychedelic dance posters, his comix work, and artwork like this, taken from the important 1972 publication, The Man From Utopia:

They might not realize the Rick Griffin they know was preceded by a Rick Griffin they don't know. I've owned this copy of Drag Cartoons #12, dated February 1965, since it was new on the stands without knowing that Rick Griffin illustrated two of the strips, for a total of five pages in the magazine. Hard to explain, but I just never noticed. I stumbled onto them while looking at an Alex Toth strip in the same issue.
Griffin started out doing cartoons for Surfing magazine. I have no idea how many issues of Drag Cartoons he appeared in. That's for the Griffin completists amongst us to tell us.

When Rick did these strips he was about 20 or 21 years old, influenced by the cartooning styles of the early 1960s, and by Mad comics, which he might have read off the newsstands as they appeared, or later encountered in the series of Mad paperbacks. Or both. In the last panel of "The Highwayman" strip he uses the word "furshluginer." A dead giveaway as to his influence.

The artwork on "The Highwayman"--writer not credited, but for the record it's by Alfred Noyes from his 1906 poem--is more detailed, using a lot of pen and ink lines. The second strip isn't as ornate, and frankly, not as good. I'm including it anyway because I just know you guys wanna see this stuff. Looking at Griffin's work during his salad days can give you a comparison of how much development he made during his career. In his case there was a huge leap of development during a very short period of time, just a couple of years.

Griffin died in 1991 in a motorcycle accident. He wasn't even 50 years old. He left a legacy of some wonderful artwork that will outlive us all. I believe that one hundred years from now the San Francisco dance posters of the 1960s will be as the Toulouse-Lautrec and Alphonse Mucha prints are to our era. The art lovers of a century hence will be celebrating an important art form, by then long gone, but idolized along with the work of the best fine artists of the era. A Rick Griffin Website is available.

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Number 185

Sex and Skeletons Without The Sex

This is the last of the Sex and Skeletons postings. I have some good skeletons, but no sex. Sorry, fellas.

As I've said before, I can still be surprised by what Golden Age covers I've never before seen, and this issue of Dark Mysteries, with a gruesome hanging cover scene, is one I encountered recently for the first time. The effect of it is dampened a bit by artist Hy Fleishman's near-cartoony approach.* For its morbid subject matter alone, in the hands of a better artist I'm sure this would be on everybody's must-have double-bag list.

One of Atlas' finest artists, Russ Heath, contributes a couple of great covers. Journey Into Fear is especially effective. I'm not sure exactly what it all means, but it's very eye-catching, and I love the sinister and amused look on the skull's partially turned face.

Our Canuck comic comrades came up with a cover that's beauty, eh. Journey Into Fear #13 has a great cover. Wait! Did I say none of these covers were sexy? A skeleton takes a pic of his vampiric girlfriend in her coffin. It looks familiar…like what I see a lot on the Internet. Bless all you gothic gals who want to share your dark visages with the world.

Strange Stories From Another World #3 is a terrific job by illustrator Norman Saunders. The guy could do no wrong, and no matter what he was illustrating he did a beautiful job. Saunders was also a best friend of Allen Anderson, featured with his own painted cover in the previous posting of Sex and Skeletons. Just click on the link "skeletons" at the bottom of this page.

Finally, Bill Everett, a leading light and artist for Atlas, like Russ Heath, comes up with yet another mind-blowing cover, this time for Venus #19. Looks like Venus is meeting her boyfriend's family, finding out they have a lot of skeletons who have come out of the closet, including her boyfriend.

*Something about the cover of Dark Mysteries #16 reminds me of the underground horror comix of a decade-and-a-half later, when artists like Greg Irons and others used a combination of cartooning and gruesomeness. The character on the cover who is speaking even has long hair, blue jeans and a collarless shirt. Since this book was published in 1954, in the fashion department he was over a decade ahead of his time.

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Number 184

Historic Horror


It's uncommon for a horror comic story to have a background in historical events, but this story, "All The King's Men," from Amazing Ghost Stories #15, has just that.

From what I've been able to research on Henri Christophe, king of Haiti, I wouldn't recommend using this story as the basis of a high school term paper, but it gives the story something exotic. Setting a story in Haiti without it being expressly about voodoo seems almost sacrilegious. Voodoo is practically the exclusive reason for stories set in Haiti. However, the comic is called Amazing Ghost Stories, and this story does have some voodoo, but the historical background using Haiti's only king is what drives the plot.

The Citadelle, shown in the story, actually exists, and is shaped like a ship, just like the character claims and the artwork shows. Unlike the story, in the encyclopedia entries I read, Christophe committed suicide using a silver bullet, not a gold bullet. Maybe he thought he was a werewolf.

The artwork is by the excellent Bob Powell, whose artwork is up to its usual high standards. St. John was the publisher of this comic, which was the continuation of the title Nightmare, and ran for three issues on its own, just before the Comics Code was implemented in 1955.



The cover is by Matt Baker, and has a voodoo theme, although it appears unrelated to this story.

Some publishers, St. John included, appear to have been spooked by the witch hunt against comics, and anticipated the Code by toning down their comics. This story probably would not have appeared in a post-Code title without some changes, but it isn't as gory as it could have been for the time it was published. The main character is a typical horror comics character, though: an irredeemable killer who gets what's coming to him.

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