Friday, April 29, 2016

Working Backwards from the Who's Who--Sam Citron

The Who's Who credits Sam Citron with Girls' Love Stories 1968 at DC. It gives him stories at Gold Key around the same time  in Ripley's Believe It or Not and The Twilight Zone. On the Grand Comics Database the latter stories, uncredited in the comics themselves, have been identified. But possibly the art spotters who paid attention to the weird anthologies at one company didn't cross over to the romance ones at another.

Gilrs' Love Stories 138

That art of Citron's for Girls' Love Stories is on "Don't Leave Me Again" in number 138 (Oct/68). As with the Gold Key stories, he's inking himself here; at ACG three or four years earlier, all his stories (credited in the comics, as per usual at that company), were inked by Pete Costanza or Tom Hickey. This story's splash page has been correctly noted in the GCD as a reprint of the Infantino & Giordano cover.

I spent some time looking though the Sixties DC romance books to see if Citron had any work obscured by inkers, but finally had to admit to myself that the handful I found were by perhaps Werner Roth or Tony Abruzzo. DC did try to homogenize art into a house style at times via the inking.

5 comments:

  1. Another great discovery. Your detective work is always appreciated. I try to keep pace with you and update the GCD credits, always linking to your blog.

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  2. It's a VAST difference from Citron's art on Superman in the 1940s.

    I would never have picked that as Citron's work in a million years!

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  3. Thanks, Nick.

    I still haven't found Citron's Superman work in the 40s, Lee, but I suspect it's assisting Wayne Boring. Hit the button for Riss art in the Labels list to the right and you'll see in my March 25, 2015 post that I'm certain all those Superman stories attributed for so long to Citron are in fact by Pete Riss. In fact, in looking over the GCD for this post, I noticed many Riss stories on Superman and at Quality are still being given to Citron.

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  4. Martin, I must have been thinking of Superman art wrongly attributed to Citron in the appropriate Superman Golden Age Archives.

    I should dig them out and have a look.

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  5. Thanks for the info about this story. I own the original art to page 7 of this story and I've always wondered who it was drawn by. I am not familiar with Sam Citron's work at all. The art is quite nice and more interesting-looking to me than the usual DC romance art. (I don't collect DC or Marvel art at all; this is the only DC page in my collection.) I sort of surmised that the art looked like a cross between Fred Guardineer (I own a '50s romance page by him. The heavy dark wrinkles on the arms of the clothes were the stylistic trait that I noticed in common.) and Stanley Pitt (inking).

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