Number 176


Airboy Gets Ghastly!

When most Golden Age comics fans think of Graham Ingels they think of him as "Ghastly," a nickname earned during his time drawing some of the creepiest horror comics ever published for EC Comics. He well deserved that nickname. But Ingels was an artist who freelanced on various other genres of comics before he signed on at EC. This particular Airboy story, from Airboy Volume 5 Number 7, August 1948, although unsigned, is undoubtedly one of his.

Ingels, who was born in 1915, was about a decade older than his fellow EC artists. Ingels was a mature and polished cartoonist by the time he started his comics career. So it is with this Airboy story, a far-fetched story about criminals killing "bums," (now called "homeless persons"), secreting dope on their bodies and shipping them to their home cities where the dope can be claimed. The crime comics element is foremost in the story, and along with the later horror stories, was a milieu well suited to Ingels' style.

Airboy's dad shows up in this story. He isn't given a name, so is he Airdad?

The comic I scanned this from is from a copy reported unsold after it went off sale. The title strip had been razored off the cover, returned for credit to the distributor. The mutilated comic was then sold by an unscrupulous storeowner or news dealer, probably for 5¢. I used to see those sorts of displays in various stores in the early to mid-1950s. I think after a time they were shut down by local magazine distributors. My copy has tape holding the razored pages together through the first few pages of the story. I didn't do the taping, and I found this issue along with a couple of others in like condition. Fortunately, the tape's adhesive hasn't dried out, so the cellophane is still intact, not fallen off leaving a stained brown residue.

The cover, which I got off the Internet, is also by Ingels, and has a really nice graphic design. The coloring, and the silhouettes of the figures against the sunset make it stand out. It's likely influenced by Will Eisner, who had some very memorable Spirit splash panels set on piers like this.

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Alley Awards: Best Covers

The Alley Awards were the comic equivalent of the Academy Awards during the 1960s although for some reason they died out after 1969. Using the information found here, the best comic covers of the 1960s were:



Also a very significant book, as we have discussed in the past.



There seems to have been a push by fandom to help out DC's resurrection of this character, as Hawkman was also chosen as best hero of 1962, despite the fact that sales of his tryout issues were insufficient to launch a solo title yet.

In 1963 there was no award for best cover per se, but this cover won for best single illustration:



I'm as baffled as you probably are by that one.



The New Look Batman picks up a win for Carmine Infantino.



An effort at reviving two Golden Age heroes. Although both this issue and Brave & Bold #62 were terrific, they did not sell enough to justify continuation.



Al Williamson's take on the comic strip classic. Various efforts were made to bring Flash Gordon to the comic books, but none ever succeeded. Most of the major publishers tried at least once--DC, Harvey, Marvel, Dell, Gold Key and King (which produced this attempt).



Neal Adams picks up the first of many awards. Note that this is the only cover chosen in the decade that has word balloons. Update: DOH! As pointed out by Snard in the comments, the Flash #123 cover also has word balloons.



Jim Steranko checks in with a memorable Nick Fury cover.



Steranko wins for the second consecutive year.

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Number 175

Bill Spicer's Fantasy Illustrated

Comics fandom was still in its infancy in 1963; while youthful fan editors were attempting to put out fanzines on crude spirit duplicators, other more mature fans were setting the course that fandom would follow. Bill Spicer was one of those innovative editors. He's been a fan for a long time, predating modern comics fandom for several years with EC fandom. He was also one of the fans responsible for thrusting artist/writer Carl Barks out of his anonymous work for Dell-Disney.

In 1963 his fanzine Fantasy Illustrated was published. It was printed, not in the purple ditto or crude mimeo form of most fanzines, but as a professional offset-printed magazine, with color covers and black and white interiors. Offset printing wasn't exactly new: Ronn Foss had published Alter Ego #5 in offset a year earlier. Comic strips in fanzines weren't new either. Roy Thomas wrote and drew the satire "Bestest League Of America," which ran in Alter Ego #1-3, and numerous other super-hero pastiches were published in the fanzines of the day, usually laboriously drawn in ballpoint pens on ditto masters. What was new with Fantasy Illustrated was publishing fan-produced comic strips much like the professional artists and writers produced theirs, with professional production and editorial direction from Spicer.

Despite its professional production, Fantasy Illustrated #1 showed the birth pains of most fanzines. Artwork varied in quality from amateurish to professional. Three of the four stories were drawn from pulp writing of the 1930s and '40s. For some reason Spicer didn't have artwork for a back cover and padded his editorial to fit in three pages which would otherwise have been blank, but the feeling was there…something new had arrived.

Landon Chesney produced the first cover, in my opinion the best of any of the subsequent issues.


For the contents, Alan Weiss' first printed offset job was very amateurish, drawn in pen with scratchy lines. It was a Jon Jarl story, "The Ancient Secret," written originally by Otto Binder as the text feature for an issue of Captain Marvel Adventures. Richard "Grass" Green, who went on to do professional comics, underground and fanzine work until his death in 2002, contributed "Will The Real Lance Lightning Please Sit Down!", a funny superhero parody suited for his cartoony style.


The third feature was the crudely drawn "Moon Ants" by Buddy Saunders, another pulp story attributed to "Thornecliff Herrick," an old Planet Comics pen-name. Finally, part 1 of "Adam Link's Vengeance," from the classic story by Otto Binder, rounded out the issue. D. Bruce Berry did the artwork. Parts 1 and 2 were reprinted in full in Spicer's Graphic Story Magazine #13 a few years later.


Future issues did some improving, especially issue #2.


It opened with "The Life Battery," taken from yet another Binder story, and illustrated by Landon Chesney. It was later reprinted in color in Spicer's underground comic, Weird Fantasies. I prefer this original printing, however, which was drawn to be printed in black and white.


Issue #3 has a cover by Chesney inspired by EC's science fiction titles.


Number 3 opened with Edgar Rice Burroughs illustrator Harry Habblitz' version of "The End Of Bukawai," a story from Jungle Tales Of Tarzan. While not drawn in a real comic book style, it is an outstanding story from this issue.


Chesney did a collaboration with Comic Book Price Guide publisher Bob Overstreet, "A Study In Horror," similar to, and done better by Harvey Kurtzman as "House Of Horror" in Tales From The Crypt #21. Overstreet soloed on a story called "March 25th" which showed that as an artist his future destiny definitely lay in publishing. The back cover of #3, done by the late Russ Manning, used color overlays to beautiful effect in a surrealistic fantasy illustration. You can see it at the top of this page.

Fantasy Illustrated begat Graphic Story Magazine which begat Fanfare, and then at some point I lost track of Spicer's publishing career. When I saw these early issues as they originally appeared I felt that they were a new direction for comics fandom, toward producing a more professional, albeit alternative, comic book. When underground comix came out a couple of years later their format didn't surprise me, because I'd already seen it with Fantasy Illustrated.

(This article is adapted and edited from an unpublished article I wrote in the early 1980s. It also covered FI issues 4-6, which I no longer own, and for which I have no scans.)

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Number 174


Ghost Rider Gives 'em Spook Justice!


I haven't posted a story from Ghost Rider #1 since March. This is story three of that issue, first published in 1950. It's written by Gardner Fox in his most melodramatic style, and illustrated by the great Dick Ayers.

This particular story brings in something that was pretty scary, and not just Ghost Rider's tricks to spook the bad guys. It has also the specter of the Ku Klux Klan. The night rider group in this story isn't identified as the KKK, but does an imitation of that terrorist organization in order to scare off a rancher. When this story was written and drawn the Klan was still very active in the South, and I'm sure any African-American Ghost Rider readers instantly recognized it.

The dialogue in this story is pretty funny, especially when written in dialect. I've always wondered where the New York writers got the idea for Western speech patterns. Some of the Western movies of the time used it, but for the most part people in movies spoke like everyday people. I've lived in the West all my life, and met many cowboys, ranchers, farmers, and none of them talk like what I read in these stories. Jeb Cole, the bad guy in this story, says, "…it's downright on-healthy fer anybody tuh compete with Jeb Cole…" C'mon, "On-healthy"?

The Ghost Rider has his own melodramatic manner of speaking. I guess he learned--or would that be "larnt?"--this talk from beyond the grave, because no one on Earth would say things like, "Drop your gun, vile man!" or "Surrender, men of evil hearts, surrender!" Not with a straight face, anyway.

Dick Ayers' artwork is, as always, perfect for the story. It's of its era, leaning toward the cartoony, but the art is as solid as ever, with great composition and dynamic inking.

Ayers' autobiography,* told in three graphic novels, came out in 2005. I've just finished reading the first volume, pictured here.


Even at the advanced age he wrote and drew the book, Ayers' solid drawing comes through. It isn't what it was sixty years before: Ayers' own appearance changes some from panel to panel and some of the lines are a little bit shaky, but it's an amazing accomplishment for an artist of his years. Not only that, it's really entertaining, giving insight into what it was to be a freelance artist during the golden age of comics. Ayers didn't call it the golden age, of course, because to him it was just comic book work. He wanted to draw comic books, set his sights on that career, and he did it as well or better than most.

Besides his drawing skills, that love for the medium of comics really shines through in his Ghost Rider work.

*The Dick Ayers Story, An Illustrated Autobiography, is available from Bud Plant Comic Art.

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Number 173

Reprints Make Pappy Happy

In 1970 Mrs. Pappy and I made a trip to Vermont, and stayed with our friends, Tom, Mary and daughter Deana. Tom was a comic book buddy of mine from the old early '60s fanzine days.

Tom was older than us by several years, so he had been around during the original Golden Age, that era from 1939 to the mid-1950s. Tom had amassed an awesome collection, including three of what you could call the Big Four of the comic books: Detective Comics #27, Batman #1, and Superman #1. He was missing only Action Comics #1 to make it the Quadruple Crown of comic book collecting. I was so impressed that I had my wife take a picture of me with the three key books he owned.

Click on pictures for full-size images.

During conversations on those warm August nights Tom and I had some beery observations about the state of the comics. I thought they were going to disappear. The distribution chain for comic books was shrinking, the price had jumped to a shocking 15¢, and the initial joy of the 1960s Marvel Comics boom had faded. I lamented, "Why doesn't someone reprint the old comic books?" We were all familiar in those days with The Great Comic Book Heroes by Jules Feiffer, which contained some of the first actual reprints of complete, color Golden Age comic book stories. There had been the Superman and Batman annuals of the early 1960s. We'd also seen the very poor Captain America reprints in Fantasy Masterpieces in the late '60s. Tom, who worked for a book publisher, said during the Batman craze circa 1966 he'd tried to get his employer to contract with DC Comics for the rights to reprint Batman #1-10. Nix, nix, they said. No market for that old junk.

Flash forward just four years, to 1974. Carmine Infantino, longtime comic artist, was the publisher of DC Comics. Obviously Carmine had wired Tom's house and miked our 1970 conversation, because the Golden Age reprints began to pour out of DC, both in thick 100-page square back annuals and also with the oversized Famous First Edition reprints. Here's a picture of Pappy's reprint versions of Tom's jewels-in-the-crown.
Infantino had some problems at DC; he had the "curse" put on the company by Superman creator, Jerry Siegel, and when DC finally couldn't take the heat from the public scolding they caved in and gave out pensions. As Siegel and Shuster got some recompense for their creation, so was Carmine Infantino shown the door. I'm glad Jerry and Joe got what was coming to them in the last years of their lives, but I immediately missed Carmine, because the reprints came to a halt. It wasn't until DC started issuing their Archive editions that large scale reprinting of the DC line was begun again.

Nowadays both Marvel and DC have their phonebook reprints, Marvel with their Essential and DC with their Showcase lines for Silver and Bronze Age reprints. I've even picked up a couple of those. The biggest commitment I made to reprints was when I resolved to have all of the EC Comics reprints done by Russ Cochran in slipcased, hardbound editions. I have them all now, and I'm very proud to own them.

I can't keep up with all of the available reprints now, and in a strange way that's good. It means the material that has been unavailable for so long is finding its way back into print. It's also why I do Pappy's Golden Age, so you can see online for free the more obscure and even oddball things published in the Golden Age. It wasn't all Superman and Batman, Captain Marvel and EC Comics.

My friend Tom, in those long ago and faraway days in Vermont, showed me a world I'd only dreamed existed, the collectors' nirvana! Box after box, full of comic books from the richest, most interesting era of comic book history. With the reprints I have gotten just a taste of what I saw at my friend Tom's house.

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Number 172


From Those Wonderful Folks Who Brought You Organized Crime

Bob Fujitani, who signed his work "Bob Fuje," was one of the best illustrators in comics for many years. He started in the WWII era drawing characters like The Hangman, but after the war went to Charles Biro, illustrating some very memorable stories for Crime Does Not Pay and Crime and Punishment. Later in his career he illustrated Doctor Solar for Gold Key, but he was also helping with comic strips, doing other illustrative work. He was a busy, in-demand artist. I'll show more stories by Fujitani in the future.

"Dion 'Gimpy' O'Banion" is the "true life" story of a Chicago gangster. The story has some truth to it, but as with all of these types of stories, names are changed, incidents are exaggerated. Some of the facts in the story are true: O'Banion did have a limp; he was a florist; he did get killed by rival gangsters. A good overview of his crime career is told here.

O'Banion made his money in bootlegging, thanks to Prohibition. Comic books also came out of Prohibition. There's an alternate history of comic books that needs more exploration, but a good start is the book Men Of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones, which helps explain some of the murky ties some comic publishers had with the Mafia. It's a pretty interesting story, and that book is highly recommended. A mob connection isn't so surprising, really, since New York City was the home of comics publishing, also the home of the Five Families, extremely powerful in that era. There wasn't much they didn't have their fingers in if it made money, and there was money to be made in comic books, especially in distribution, printing and other business aspects.

In the meantime, the guys who made the least money were the ones who made the comic books great. So it was with Bob Fujitani. I doubt that Lucky Luciano could ever produce a comic book, but he could make sure he got his cut of the profits. Bob Fujitani's artwork would be a reason for someone to plunk down his dime for a comic. Fujitani got a page rate and no cut of the profits.

This particular story came from Crime and Punishment #5 (1948).

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