Friday, November 28, 2014

An Unheralded Sixties Marvel Artist

There are a number of comics at companies like Dell and Tower in the Sixties where Joe Giella shares the inking with Frank Giacoia—most noticeably over Mike Sekowsky's pencils, but with other pencillers as well. The publishers don't give credits to anyone on those stories.

On his work with Giacoia at mid-Sixties Marvel, Giella goes uncredited. Giacoia gets the credit (as "Frank Ray") when inking credit is given; the four girls' titles, Patsy Walker's and Millie the Model's, are the last to switch over to more than just writer and penciller signatures, in 1965.

There are some shake-ups in the art on Patsy Walker and Patsy and Hedy before this: Stan Goldberg and Sol Brodsky pinch-hitting for Al Hartley on pencils, for instance (Brodsky pencils PW 120 and 121 below, but Hartley returns for the others). Inkers such as Chic Stone and Vince Colletta come aboard for a few issues—it took Nick Caputo's ID of Stone on the GCD to place that artist for me on the feature; no problems with recognizing Colletta! I'd agree that the inking on P & H 101 is John Tartaglione's, so it's skipped below.

It looks as if Giella inks the majority of pages on all of these issues save P & H 102. I think I might see a few Giella pages where one close-up face has been inked by Giacoia, whose inks editor Stan Lee was no doubt expecting to see somewhere. Al Hartley's pencils manage to show through Giella's inks, but some of Sol Brodsky's pages might as well be pencilled by Giella himself in the Sheldon Moldoff style; these pages with their Bob Kane hands are from Patsy Walker 121.

Patsy Walker 121

Joe Giella does do some credited inking for Marvel a decade later, and in fact shares the inking credits with Frank Giacioa on Power Man 35 (Sep/76).

Joe Giella and Frank Giacoia inks
on Patsy Walker


Apr/65 120  What Can We Do about Nancy Brown?
Jun/     121  Another Spring, Another City, Another Love
Aug/     122  No Greater Love
Oct/     123  Don't Leave Me, My Love

on Patsy and Hedy

Jun/65 100  When a Girl Becomes...a Woman
Oct/     102  So Much Love, So Few Kisses [mostly Giacoia]
Aug/     103  Love's Finest Hour

6 comments:

  1. Martin,

    I need to take a closer look at many Giacoia only credited inking jobs in 60's era Marvel titles. I'm sure he often helped Giacoia out of a bind and likely assisted on titles such as Daredevil and Iron-Man.

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  2. Martin,

    I also think I detect Giella's hand assisting Giacoia on the cover of Patsy Walker # 121, particularly on Patsy's face and figure. What do you think?

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  3. I've added the Giella credits to the GCD and linked to your blog. It also looks like Giella assisted on the covers to Patsy and Hedy #'s 101 and 103.

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  4. I can see that on P & H 101 and 103, Nick. On PW 121, the situation is even more complicated when it looks like two different pencillers were involved--Hartley on Patsy and Brodsky on Mike (look at his hands).

    I'm pretty sure Brodsky pencilled the cover of P & H 102 (and Stan Goldberg did P & H 96's, swamped under Colletta's inks). It looks as if Brodsky continues on the fashion pages for an issue or two after Hartley returns to the stories; they aren't necessarily by the story artist.

    I was glad to get to finally read some Marvels I'd missed back when they came out, but they raise enough questions as one reads them!

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  5. I'm with you on the cover to PW 121, although I'm not sure if there are Brodsky pencils involved or only his inking you detect. With P & H 102 I'm less certain of Brodsky's pencils. The characters look a little too good (Brodsky's figures had a tendency towards stiffness).

    There are still quite a few teen romance titles of this era I've not investigated thoroughly (thanks to Doc V I've been able to go through many of his titles but he doesn't have everything.

    And there are always questions to be raised, Martin, but if that wasn't the case we wouldn't have blogs titled Who Wrote the Comics or Marvel Mysteries and Comics Minutiae!

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  6. Nick, I 'll admit Sol Brodsky's pencils are a weak point for me, considering how hard it is to divine his style under Vince Colletta's inks--and knowing that at times his name was used as a front for other penciller entirely (Stan Goldberg, for one, when Millie returned to the humor style).

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