Number 384


Zakka's Debt


Here's a tale of the high seas, mutiny, mayhem and a gentle giant's friendship with a young boy. I probably should've posted this last Friday on Talk Like A Pirate Day.

It's from Buster Brown Comic Book #33, published sometime in the mid-1950s, and drawn by Reed Crandall.


Last time I posted a Reed Crandall story from Buster Brown #30, George Freeman wrote a comment to tell us it was inked by Ray Willner. As George pointed out, Willner's inking was more angular than Crandall's. Willner has a signed story in #33, one of his Indian elephant boy Gunga stories. I think he did not only the pencilling and inking on Gunga, but the inking over Crandall's pencils as well.

If there's anything about this comic that bugs me it's that the Zakka character on the cover--drawn by Willner?--doesn't match at all the character on the inside. The guy on the cover looks like he's older, shorter and leaner, and a lot less capable of hoisting a mast than Crandall's giant. When you see a glaring discrepancy like this you wonder where the editor was.

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Trivia Quiz #10 Answers

1. The Trigger Twins, Walt and Wayne Trigger. Walt is the heroic local sheriff, while Wayne is apparently a meek and mild shopkeeper. But unknown to others, Wayne is secretly the hero and Walt simply a goof-prone lawman who relies on his brother to dress up as him and capture the bad guys. In an amusing twist on the Lois/Clark/Superman theme, Linda, Wayne's assistant, notices how often her boss disappears from view whenever there's trouble, but she attributes it not to him sneaking off to dress up as the sheriff, but as real cowardice.

2. Pow-Wow Smith, Indian lawman. A Sioux deputy sheriff who appeared for several years as a backup in Detective Comics and was often cover-featured on Western Comics:



3. The Nighthawk:


The Nighthawk was a "fix-it" man, who while roaming from town to town repairing items also solved crimes in a secret identity as a masked man with a hawk emblem on his chest.

4. The Wyoming Kid was a wandering cowboy who fought cattle rustlers and other western crooks.

5. Strong Bow was a 1400s Native American who traveled around North America, righting wrongs and fighting foes.

Kudos to Michael Sensei, who got them all!

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Number 383


Pepe y Pepito


Paul Murry is one of my favorite funny animal artists, but I had trouble finding anything he drew that wasn't for Disney. Murry was best known for his Mickey Mouse comics done from the 1950s to the '70s. I avidly followed his serials in the back of Walt Disney's Comics and Stories, enjoying them almost as much as the Barks Donald Duck strips. I don't scan and post Disney comics, so I was happy to find "Pepe and Pepito" as the closing strip for the giant comic, Woody Woodpecker's County Fair #2 from 1958.

Murry had a real animated, solid drawing style, and he had a great ink line. I read once that he criticized Barks--horrors! criticize Carl Barks??!!--for using too thin a pen line, because of the limitations of the comic book format. Barks' work seems to have survived the process just fine, and Murry's looked great, too. Murry wasn't the auteur that Barks was, so I took the criticism for what it was worth. Murry was one of the best of the Mickey Mouse artists. For me it's a toss-up between Floyd Gottfredson and his Mickey Mouse comic strip work of the '30s and '40s, and Murry with his comic book work in the '50s and '60s. They're both great, but I'll always lean a little toward Murry because his was the Mickey I grew up with.

Murry died in 1989.

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Number 382


"I took eight bullets out of him and still he lives!"


Growing up I liked the Batman-type characters the best, the ones who used brains, skill and strength rather than super powers. The Black Hood has survived several incarnations since his origin in Top-Notch Comics #9, October 1940. All of those versions have been published by Archie Comics, which started in business as the rowdy publisher, MLJ Comics. Before being taken over by teenagers like Archie, the writers and artists at MLJ did some very entertaining comics full of ghastly characters, murders, horror...you know, the fun stuff.

Black Hood is policeman Kip Burland, who as you'll see in this origin story, gets shot full of holes by the henchmen of a villain called the Skull. Eight bullets. And only some old hermit--who doesn't give his name but confesses he was a "western sheriff"--to operate. In a cabin. In the woods.

Of course Kip comes back from his near death experience stronger and more able than ever once he's in his snappy Black Hood costume. But you can't keep a good villain down, and the folks who did Black Hood knew that they had a good one in the Skull.

The story was written by Cliff Campbell and drawn by Al Camy.

The scans were provided by correspondent 1506NixNix. Thanks, Nix!

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Friday Trivia Quiz #10: Way Out West

For whatever reason, western movies were extremely popular in the 1950s, and comic publishers were not far behind. DC had Tomahawk, Western Comics, All-Star Western and All-American Western as well as magazines featuring Jimmy Wakely, Dale Evans and Hopalong Cassidy. Among them, only Tomahawk would last to the end of the 1960s (and that just barely).

Your mission is to identify these five DC western heroes:

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#063.Spider Man 3

The Amazing Spider-Man (Marvel, all 1964)

index.pdf



Issue 08 Jan 1964

Issue 09 Feb 1964

Issue 10 Mar 1964

Issue 11 Apr 1964

Issue 12 May 1964



Issue 13 June 1964

Issue 14 July 1964

Issue 15 Aug 1964

Issue 16 Sep 1964

Issue 17 Oct 1964



Issue 18 Nov 1964

Issue 19 Dec 1964

These are Dr. Krishna's contributions.

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