Trapani and Friends at ACG

Sal Trapani and his ghost pencillers come aboard for ACG's final two years of operation. Bill Ely is his sole ghost there for nine stories as of the 1967-dated issues. Ely's regular assignment at DC, Rip Hunter, ended in late 1965.

My impression is that Rocco Mastroserio penciled the first page of "The Mirror of Mystery"; Dick Giordano certainly did the remaining three. What do you think?

There were six other Ditko/Trapani stories at ACG after "My Ancestor—the Indian Scout," all credited to both artists, so not on these lists of ghosted ones. I daresay that Richard Hughes said "Oh, come on!" to the idea that the readers wouldn't recognize that particular penciller. (For what it's worth, after ghosting the pencils on Nukla 1 at Dell, Giordano gets a signature along with Trapani's on #2 and 4, as does Ditko on #4.)

Adventures into the Unknown

Dec-Jan/67	169	Two Vials from Vidalia	p: Bill Ely
Jun-Jul/	173	Miss Hepzibah Takes a Trip	p: Ely

Forbidden Worlds

Nov-Dec/65	132	The Mirror of Mystery	p: Rocco Mastroserio, Dick Giordano
Jul/67	144	"Click, Click," Went the Machine	p: Ely

Gasp!

Mar/67	1	The Terrible Teen-Agers	p: Ely
Apr-May/	2	Vengeful Spirit	p: Ely
Jun-Jul/	3	Sorry, You've Got the Wrong Ghosts	p: Ely
Aug/	4	You've Got to Relax	p: Ely

Unknown Worlds

Feb/66	45	My Ancestor—the Old Indian Scout	p: Steve Ditko
Mar/	46	That's My Partner	p: Giordano
Mar/67	53	The Haunted Brush	p: Ely
Aug/	57	When the Gizmo Blew a Gasket	p: Ely

Interestingly enough, there's an ACG story ghosted by rather than for Sal Trapani. The art on the other new story in Unknown Worlds 53 is credited solely to Bob Jenney, but Trapani is inking Jenney's pencils.

Unknown Worlds

Mar/67

53

Ghost Girls Don't Play Football

i: Sal Trapani

Second Try on a Trapani Ghost

Artist- and writer-spotting is more an art than a science, but the more it can be treated like a science, the better. If more and better evidence leads to a different conclusion, a theory evolves.

In other words, I saw (here) Don Perlin-type faces under Sal Trapani's inks on Hogan's Heroes 4. But after finding the same penciller's style under Trapani inks in other comics, with some panels a bit more obvious, I revise my identification. Trapani's ghost penciller here is Bill Ely.

The funny thing is that I was led to this in a Trapani-less Charlton issue. The unsigned first story ("The Witness") in The Many Ghost of Dr. Graves 1 (May/67) was obviously by Ely but didn't seem to match up with the early-Sixties art of his at DC I was accustomed to. My first thought was, "He's using the same ghost penciller as Sal Trapani," and then I applied Occam's razor—it's simpler just to accept Ely as penciller in both instances.

The figures of Colonel Klink falling (especially in panel 3) on this Hogan's Heroes page are the clue to Ely's style here; that style peeks through on the cop in panel 1 of the Superheroes page, and more noticeably in the figure of Dan's father in panel 3.

Another penciller (or two) did Superheroes 3 and 4 for Trapani. Ely did more ghosting for him outside Dell, and I'll list those in the next post.

Bill Ely pencils on Hogan's Heroes

Mar/67

4

Operation Flick Flack

On Superheroes

Jan/67	1	The Origin of the Fab Four
Apr/	2	The Clowns
		Nutt's Revenge
		Enslaved

Not the Two-Gun Kid

At Quality, Chuck Winter had a four-issue run in Buccaneers, as I posted here. He had twice that in Crack Western on Two-Gun Lil.

On the first four stories I'm taking the Grand Comics Database artist attributions as a start. I think I see three artists among the first four stories (the same one on #64 and 65). Leo Morey is known to have worked on the series, but I can't match him up from his signed stories at ACG a decade later; it may be that he's being inked by other hands here.

Two-Gun Lil in Crack Western

Nov/49	63	She Was Ready	w: Joe Millard  a: Charles    Sultan?
Jan/50	64	The Forbidden Star	w: ?  a: Leo Morey?
Mar/	65	The Dance Hall of Death	w: ?  a: Morey?
May/	66	Even Frontier Terrorists Can Learn	w: ?  a: ?
Jul/	67	Two-Gun Lil Votes against Lynch Law	w: ?  a: Pete Riss
Sep/	68	Two-Gun Lil Conquers Western Crime	w: ?  a: Riss
Nov/	69	Hot-Lead Two-Step	w: Millard  a: Chuck Winter
Jan/51	70	The Taming of Big Bat McGrew	w: Millard  a: Winter
Mar/	71	A Bargain in Bullets	w: Millard  a: Winter
May/	72	The Ghost of Grim Gulch	w: Millard  a: Winter
Jul/	73	Six-Guns from the Sky	w: Millard  a: Winter
Sep/	74	Gun Trouble in Paradise	w: Millard  a: Winter
Nov/	75	The Vultures of Goldhill	w: Millard  a: Winter
Jan/52	76	The End of the Owlhoot Trail	w: Millard  a: Winter
Mar/	77	A Heart as Big as a House	w: ?  a: Pete Morisi
May/	78	Once upon a Time There Were Three Bassett Brothers	w: Robert Bernstein  a:   Morisi
Sep/	80	The Murder on Stage	w: Bernstein  a: Morisi
Nov/	81	The Target Is Two-Gun Lil	w: Bernstein  a: Morisi
Jan/53	82	Target of Hot Lead	w: Bernstein  a: Morisi
Mar/	83	The Fiend in Knee Pants	w: Bernstein  p: John Forte     i: ?
May/	84	The Kissing Monster	w: Bernstein  a: Edmond    Good

Dick Wood at Charlton, 1956

Dick Wood was credited for scripts at Charlton, but that was in 1969. He had a run of Phantom stories just after the company took over the title from King Comics. Those may have been inventory scripts, or Charlton may have hired him for his familiarity with the character; three of his scripts were illustrated by Charlton artists like Jim Aparo. The fourth, the only one drawn there by Bill Lignante, I'd imagine was completed at King and so looks an inventory story on all counts. But to paraphrase Arlo Guthrie, that's not what I'm here to talk about.

I'm here to talk about 1956.

Scanning Charlton's Fifties output for Carl Memling stories, I couldn't help seeing some by Dick Wood; his style is so colorful: "Great suffering Hannah!" or in the case above, "Jumping cats!" I find a handful of his stories, all in the one year. Before anyone asks, I haven't IDed the writer on the four other new Blue Beetle stories of the period, in BB 20 and 21 (June and August, 1955).

Dick Wood 1950s Charlton Scripts

Blue Beetle
in Nature Boy

Mar/56

3

Unmasked

p: Charles Nicholas  i: Sal Trapani

anthology stories:
Out of This World

Aug/56

1

The Mission from Outer Space

a:  Nicholas

Racket Squad in Action

Feb/56

20

The Portrait Racketeers

p: Bill Molno  i: Trapani

Strange Suspense Stories

Aug/56

30

Lost Child

p: Molno  i: Trapani

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.

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

More Charlton Crime from Carl Memling

You'd imagine that Charlton's Racket Squad in Action would be the least objectionable of the crime comics, its subject matter being swindles rather than injuries to the eye or Tommy-gun massacres. I'm sure Frederick Wertham considered it a how-to manual, however; and certainly Charlton put out enough other material sitting there smoking and saying, "What are you gonna do? Comics-Code me?"


Walter B. Gibson is listed as assistant editor on issues 1-9. Although so far I've concentrated on finding Carl Memling's stories, it strikes me that Gibson could have written all the stories in #1-7 as well as "The Fake Bond Swindle" in #9.

Carl Memling turns out to be Charlton's main writer from mid-1953 into early 1955 by cover dates. (He’s well-represented in their horror comics too.) There are other writers; in Racket Squad 13, "Malignant Model Agency" and "The Basketball Scandals" are by the same person, whoever that may be. Ken Fitch is known to have written Racket Squad in 1955-56. Joe Gill starts writing for the title in 1956 (it did survive under the Code) and is its sole comics writer by the last issue, #29, in 1958.

Carl Memling Scripts in
Racket Squad in Action

Aug/53	8	In the Driver's Seat
		The Death Notice Racket
		Hush Money
		The Misery Chiselers
Oct/	9	Two Fisted Fix
		Reverse Twist
		Letter Perfect
Jan/54	10	Stamp of Guilt
		A Handful of Aces
		When Two Thieves Meet
		Door to Door Swindle
		The Stradivarius Swindle
M-J/	11	Botticelli of the Bangtails
		Photo Frame-Up
A-S/	12	Robbery by Appointment
		The Ransom Swindle
		Refund Artist
		Protection Game
O-N/	13	Your Money or Your Face!
		Hot Ice
		A Case for the Police
		Free Pick-Up
Jan/55	14	The Big Freeze
		Shakedown
		The Double-Talk-Artists
Mar/	15	Limited Edition
		Blackmail
		Double Trouble

The Ghost in Operation Bikini

"Operation Bikini," a 1963 AIP movie with Frankie Avalon, might sound like a Beach Party movie, but it came out before the first of that series; it was a World War II frogmen story. Until 1946 and the A-bomb tests there inspired a name for the new "atomic" swimsuit style, "Bikini" would have meant only the Pacific atoll. (AIP's publicity department didn't let that bother them for the posters.)

A number of the Movie Classics (and other Dell titles) included among their artists combinations of Vince Colletta, Dick Giordano, Joe Sinnott, John Tartaglione, Frank McLaughlin, Sal Trapani, and various Trapani ghosts. Operation Bikini (Oct/63) most obviously features Colletta's inks on the entire issue.

I can tell myself that I see a few Giordano poses or faces on later pages. That may just be because I expect to see him there, but certainly there were multi-artist jams among this loose group of artists at Dell. His deciding the poses would make those pages his pencils, of course, not inks. On one or two of the later pages I could admit the possibility of pencils by, say, Sinnott.

Most pages' pencils, though, belong to none of that group, it seems to me. Giordano or Sinnott's pencils usually show better through Colletta's inks, overwhelming as the inks are. There's one touch that I don't recall seeing Sinnott or Giordano use that made me consider a particular artist.

I believe the penciller on most of the book, certainly the first part, is Sam Citron. Note the distinctive motion lines around the head of Malone in the second panel of the Dell page. Compare with the same from "Menace of the Renegades" in Quality's Exploits of Daniel Boone 6 (Sept/56).  And see the lines used to indicate not head-swiveling but confusion in "Strange Planet" from ACG's Adventures into the Unknown 146 (Feb/64). On the latter story, Citron's pencils are credited (Pete Costanza is the inker).

At least those various artists' Dells would give indexers something to pore over for half a century—and beyond...