Mix-and-Match Swipe

Gutenberg Montiero's cover painting for Creepy 24 (Dec/68) swipes two earlier paintings.

An unknown artist painted the cover for the Berkley paperback Masters of Horror (1967); Rafael De Soto painted the one for the pulp magazine Black Mask (Sept/46).

Artist of the First (or Second) Modern Graphic Novel

1950's Mansion of Evil from Fawcett Gold Medal Books is credited only to the scripter, Joseph Millard. The artist is Bud Thompson. The tiers below, from the story "Guilty of Murder" in the final issue of Fawcett's Captain Marvel Jr.--#119, June 1953--show some of the same silhouetted or partially silhouetted figures as in Mansion of Evil.

The previous guess on the Mansion of Evil art is George Evans--but only on two of the eleven chapters, when the style is the same throughout.

Auteurs of the Graphic Novel

Nowadays every issue of a comic book is a temporarily embarrassed graphic novel.

My definition of graphic novel: A book using original comics material in narrative. The important word here is book, so length isn't a criterion--"novel" encompasses collections (like A Contract with God, by the way). A magazine isn't a book, so His Name Is Savage, for instance, doesn't meet the definition. And if it isn't limited to original material, the floodgates open for an appalling number of titles from comic strips and comic books. Note that these three Pogo books are the original-material ones among, otherwise, collections. I say "in narrative" to omit single-page gags of the "talking in pictures" sort, although fumetti would otherwise fit--for instance, in the 70s, Richard J. Anobile's Fotonovels. (And so if we were including magazines, Charlton's 1963 full-length Black Zoo would predate the 1968 His Name Is Savage anyway.)

Mansion of Evil and It Rhymes with Lust are each dated just 1950, so which one is the first modern graphic novel is a question--but it's one or the other.

I'm pushing the definition of "original" with Passionella, but one of the four stores is original and the others have been revised and redrawn for the book. I dithered over the six 1962 Tintin books form Golden Press--they are new American translations--and decided not to include them. Belmont's High Camp Superheroes and My Son the Teenager I left off too, as the new material in them was prepared for the comics and by luck came out in the paperbacks first.

Can you think of any I'm missing through 1970? UPDATE--2 days later--The Monkees occurred to me when I happened to be thinking of the more usual TV tie-in comics and novels. FURTHER UPDATE: OtherEric in his comment contributed The Pogo Poop Book.

1940s-60s American Graphic Novels
abbreviations: mass market paperbacks, hardcovers, trade paperbacks

1950	Mansion of Evil	Fawcett	pb
	It Rhymes with Lust	St. John	digest
1953	Uncle Pogo So-So Stories	S&S	hc, tp
1954	The Pogo Stepmother Goose	S&S	tp
1955	The Pogo Peek-a-Book	S&S	hc, tp
1959	Passionella and Other Stories	McGraw-Hill	tp
	Harvey Kurtzman's Jungle Book	Ballantine	pb
1960	The Flintstones on the Rocks	Dell	small tp
	Huck and Yogi Jamboree	Dell	small tp
1962	Don Martin Steps Out	Signet	pb
	[and many more MAD originals]
1966	Christopher Lee's Treasury of Terror	Pyramid	pb
	Dracula	Ballantine	pb
	The Monkees	Popular Library	pb
	The Great Society Comic Book	Parallax	small tp
	Bobman and Teddy	Parallax	small tp
	Kosher Comics	Parallax	small tp
	The Pogo Poop Book	S&S	tp
1967	The Man from M.O.T.H.E.R.	Parallax	smaller tp

Dick Wood and Mr. Crime

Dick Wood was credited for any number of stories in Crime Does Not Pay at Lev Gleason, but by no means all. This is a list of his anonymous ones that I've found. There are CDNP issues missing here that haven't been scanned yet. Scarce due to Forties paper drives? Fifties comic book burnings?

Dick Wood is recognizable by expressions like "Suffering Hannah," and in Crime Does Not Pay he has an even easier-to-spot characteristic on some stories. Starting with the bylined story "The True Life Story of 'Pretty Boy Floyd'" leading off #27, when he uses narrator Mr. Crime, very often the latter prefaces a speech or caption with "Ho, folks," or "Ho, Pretty Boy" to the protagonist, or just "Ho," all with a comma--"Ho, and where is he now?" The tiers are from the bylined story "One-Man Crime Wave" in #35.

I've mentioned Wood's use of the exclamation "Kazar" in The Claw, Jigsaw, and The Phantom; here he uses it in, for instance, "The True Story of Jean Cavillac" in #31 and "Wild Beasts of Paris" in #38--and it's after seeing it here that I realize it's meant for "Huzzah."

Dick Wood scripts without byline
in CRIME DOES NOT PAY

May/	27	The Dead-Eye Romeo
		The Strange Saga of Rafael Red Lopez
Sep/	29	The True Story of "Two-Gun" Crowley
Nov/	30	The Texas Terrors
		Crime Close-Ups
Jan/44	31	The True Story of Jean Cavillac
		The Million Dollar Robbery
Mar/	32	The Man Who Loved Murder
		Señorita of Sin
		Playboys of Crime
Jan/45	37	10 Years of Terror: Vincent Piazzero
		Case of the Confident Killer
		The Singing Slayer
Mar/	38	The Meek Murderer
		Murder by Night
		Wild Beasts of Paris
May/	39	Blonde Queen of Crime
		The Case of the Tell-Tale Watch
		The Crime of Terry Almodovar
Sep/	41	The Cocksure Counterfeiter
		Who Dunnit?
Jan/46	43	Case of the Love Sick Clown
		Doctor of Evil
Mar/	44	The True Story of "Legs" Diamond
		Death on the Tracks
May/	45	The True Story of John Dillinger
		The Fire Fiend
		Crime of the Friendly Enemy
Sep/	47	Thug's Throne
		The Horrible Halzingers
Jan/47	49	The Case of the Voodooed Hangars
Mar/	50	The Belmont Bandit

A Harvey Gh-gh-ghost on Bunny

The only attribution at the moment for the art on Harvey's Sixties teen-type title Bunny is Hy Eisman. His sneak signature is in a number of early stories in the form of the license plate "Hy 27 E" on four different cars in "Discarteque" (#1), "The Ultrazaric Decodifier," "Guests from England," and "Poetic Justice" (#2); the "27" (Eisman's birthday) is on photographer Elmer Snapple's door in "The Playpen Contest" (#1) and it continues on his door in, for instance, "The 'Zoople' Contest" (#2).

And since Eisman is the main artist, when there are figures (of secondary characters) in another artist's style, I'm going to say that artist was assisting Eisman unknown to the Harvey editors and thus a ghost. The artist I see is Gus Lemoine from Archie (most notably Madhouse). These pages are from "O. O. Heaven" and "The Playpen Contest."

Upon my first look I went along with the GCD, wondering if there were unknown artists on a few early stories, but I think it's the inconsistency in inking styles among different stories before one style is settled upon with issue #3. (Eisman himself or other inkers? I can't tell.) I'd give the main pencilling credit on all "Bunny family" stories to Eisman.

Bunny pencil assists by Gus Lemoine

Dec/66	1	Rookie Secret Agent O. O. Heaven
		Discarteque
		The Mush Meal Caper
		Tiger Bunny
		The Playpen Contest
Apr/67	2	The Ultrazaric Decodifier

Jack Oleck in Marvel Tales and Journey into Mystery

Jack Oleck's writing style is recognizable in the Had-He-But-Known phrasing on the first page of his first story for Atlas's Journey into Mystery: Monty could still think, then...he could still reason...

The main writer for the Atlas fantasy anthologies by this time is Carl Wessler, with rather more stories than Oleck; Wessler's are known from Robin Snyder's transcribing the writer's records in History of the Comics.

Marvel Tales was cancelled with #159 in the Atlas Implosion in 1957; Journey into Mystery was too, with #47, but was reinstated a year later with a few issues out of inventory (although no Oleck scripts) before the beginning of the proto-Marvel lineup (much more work from Jack Kirby, for one) leading into the monster phase.

Jack Oleck scripts
in Journey into Mystery

Aug/56	#37	The Voice in the Night
Nov/	#40	How Harry Escaped
Dec/	#41	I Switched Bodies
Jan/57	#42	Humans...Keep Out!
Feb/	#43	It's Waiting for Me
Apr/	#45	What Happened to Harrison
May/	#46	Voodoo
June/	#47	Bring Back My Body
		He Sits in the Fog!

in Marvel Tales

July/56	#148	The Despot
Aug/	#149	The Thief
Nov/	#152	When Mongorr Appeared
Dec/	#153	It Can't Be Done!
		The Last Man Alive
Feb/57	#155	Man in a Trance
Mar/	#156	Forbidden...Keep Out!
Apr/	#157	The Man Who Was Replaced
		The Man Who Changed
Aug/	#159	The Last Look

A Mysterious Script

Writer Burt Frohman kept records by filing away his comic-book scripts with copies of the issues they were published in; when the Frohman collection was sold off, the scripts were included with the relevant comics. Doc V. shows a few Frohman scripts for Atlas in his Timely-Atlas-Comics post on Stan Lee in the Timely years (use Find twice for Frohman).

This is a script page that was on the Internet by itself (at this point I can't recall where); the stapled-on note to the artist creates a problem in connecting the script with the published story, as the note covers up most of the recipient and the title. The publisher name seems to end in "Productions." (Click for a better view).

When I tried searching for the name of the protagonist, Les Everhurd, on the Grand Comics Database, I came up with nothing; he hadn't been entered as a character. Finally--a few days ago--I Googled the name, and found it elsewhere on the Internet--MyComicShop did enter Everhurd's name in the description. That guessed-at "Productions" may be "Lev Gleason Publiactions"--with the a and the c switched in the heat of typing. The instructions to the artist to leave the top third of the page blank show that this was commissioned as a lead story, as that's where that warning box went for a few months in the Lev Gleason books.

Interestingly enough, although this is supposed to be the only existing copy of the script, it doesn't show any of the editing done to the dialog/caption before it got lettered. In fact all the dialog was dropped, but most of it Frohman reuses when this scene appears toward the end of the story.

Burt Frohman Script Seen Online

Crime and Punishment--Lev Gleason

Nov/52

#56

A Dame Deals Death