Mickey Spillane had plenty of text pages at Timely, but not a single
credited comics story. He was one of the group of writers working for
Funnies, Inc. supplying strips to a number of publishers, Timely and
Novelty being the two getting the longest spans of issues from the
shop, I believe.
I hadn't seen a Novelty book until I started looking into the Funnies,
Inc. output a few weeks ago, and was pleased to find a number of
stories credited to the writers as well as artists on the splash pages.
The bottom tier here is from Spillane's
Cadet story "Espionage! In the Senate Building!" in
Target
Vol.
3 #7 (Sept/42).
The other writers whose stories I've begun to find more of include Ray
Gill, Kermit Jaediker, Roy Garn, and George Kapitan. The most noted, of
course, is future novelist Spillane. So far I've found all of
two stories I'd attribute to him at Timely.
He's known to have worked on the short-lived WWII-centric strip
Jap-Buster Johnson, and in fact this story is the origin, "Friendship"
from
U.S.A. Comics
6 (Dec/42). The Spillaneism I've excerpted in all three tiers is "keed"
for "kid"; the "yup" seen here is another one he uses. "Aghrr", seen later in the story,
in various
hyphenizations is used by a number of the Funnies, Inc. writers,
although this is the one time I've seen Spillane use it. It's in the
next story in #7, but among other things, Johnson's first name has
changed from Doug to Everett, so I don't jump at Spillane for that one.
His one Timely superhero story that I've come across so far is "The
Case of the Attempted Dreadnaught Disasters" in
Human
Torch 7
(Spring/42). A Spillaneism seen later in the story is "Ye gods." This
is the point at which Carl Burgos had just stopped writing all the
Torch stories he was drawing.
I hope eventually this will lead to Mickey Spillane’s stories elsewhere—for Captain Marvel and such.
