A Crossover in Prose and an Homage Cover

Having posted on the American Perry Rhodan book series for some swipes in the covers, I'm turning to the original digest series in German prose and another such series begun decades later.

The Perry Rhodan #1 (Sept 8, 1961) cover is by Johnny Bruck and the Maddrax #523 (Feb 4, 2020) one is by Néstor Taylor for that series' 20th anniversary. A reproduction of the Bruck cover is included in the Maddrax digest just to make it obvious the new cover is an homage.

Perry Rhodan's story begins when, making the first landing on the Moon in 1971, he brings back advanced technology from a stranded ship of the Arkonide star empire in order to prevent World War III and then protect Earth from possible alien invasion. In his series, Matt Drax undergoes a Buck Rogers transition into the post-apocalyptic future and at this point in his adventures is on an Earth littered with pockets of parallel worlds.

Needless to say, Maddrax and his companions enter 1971 and meet Rhodan and company just back from the Moon (thus actually in the second issue of PR, "Die Dritte Macht"--"The Third Power.") By the end of the story, Rhodan's memory is wiped of the encounter--if that reminds you of any comic book time-travel crossovers. Also in the comic book way, this is a cross-company crossover. 

"Crossover" was written by Oliver Fröhlich, and the first two Perry Rhodans by, respectively, K. H. Scheer and Clark Darlton. Perry Rhodan is at issue #3140, having been published weekly all this time.

Another Hidden Penciller

Click it to see the double page at a better size. This is another case of a rather overpowering inker hiding the penciller's style is "I Want to Be Free--to Live, to Love" in DC's Falling in Love 122 (Apr/71). The Grand Comics Database suggests Tony deZuñiga is inking himself. But try to picture the pencils without the distraction of deZuñiga's very distinctive style; this artist usually inked himself through the Sixties. Take a moment to look for the characteristic poses in a number of panels, before going to the second page where I've named him.

A Trapani Ghost on the Ghost Who Walks, and Writers

"The Secret of the Golden Ransom" in Charlton's first issue of The Phantom--#30--may or may not have been a ghosting job as far as the editors knew, but it certainly ended up one for fandom, as the pencils as well as the inks have ever since been attributed to Sal Trapani. The penciller is José Delbo, artist on Billy the Kid at Charlton at the time.

The script was evidently passed along out of inventory from King, like Gary Poole's in the same issue and Dick Wood's in the next few. The writer is Pat Fortunato, who wrote the earlier Girl Phantom story, "The Riddle of the Witch," in #24. Note the profusion of exclamation points and question marks in one panel; this would be a noticeable characteristic of Fortunato's work in her credited (and uncredited) work on UFO Flying Saucers at Gold Key.

This post was just going to ID that one Charlton story, but upon seeing how other issues have been attributed on the Grand Comics Database, I ended expanding it by a lot. On the Gold Key issues, the GCD notes that some 40 years after these were published, Bill Harris said he wrote all the Phantom stories. The Comic Reader 40 is cited for attributing the story in #11 as by "Dick Wood?" in addition to "Bill Harris?" That story's note does suggest that actually Harris said he wrote the adaptations of Lee Falk strip stories, which makes more sense. TCR 32 also mentions Wood: "Dick Wood is still scripting SOLAR, and he'll be handling the original PHANTOM scripts." The source of the contemporary Gold Key news at TCR? Gold Key editor Bill Harris.

For your perusal: panels from the Claw story in Daredevil Comics 22 (Feb/46, Lev Gleason), "Interplanetary Olympics" in Jigsaw 2 (Dec/66, Harvey), and "The Terror Tiger" in Phantom 21, all with the use of "Kazar" for "Huzzah"--like "Great suffering Hannah" elsewhere, a sign of Dick Wood's scripting.

I suppose most of the stories not listed here through #30 are indeed by Bill Harris.

Some Phantom writers
Gold Key/King/Charlton

Apr/65	11	Blind Man's Bluff	Dick Wood
June/	12	The Beast of Bengali	Wood
Aug/	13	The Phantom Chronicles	Wood
Nov/66	19	The Astronaut and the Pirates	Wood
		The Masked Emissary	Wood
Jan/67	20	The Adventures of the Girl Phantom	Wood
		The Invisible Demon	Jerry Siegel
Mar/	21	The Terror Tiger	Wood
Mar/	22	The Secret of Magic Mountain	Wood
Mar/	23	Delilah	Wood
Aug/	24	The Riddle of the Witch	Pat Fortunato
Oct/	26	The Pearl Raiders	Wood
Nov/	27	The Story of Hero	Gary Poole
Dec/	28	Diana's Deadly Tour	Wood
Feb/69	30	The Secret of the Golden Ransom	Fortunato
			p: José Delbo  i: Sal Trapani

in Mandrake the Magician
King

Nov/66	2	The Pirate Raiders	Wood
Mar/67	4	The Girl Phantom	Wood

Weisbecker Sports and War at Fawcett

On these Clem Weisbecker pencil jobs at Fawcett, my impression is that Sheldon Moldoff inked most of the true-life baseball stories--in Jackie Robinson and Baseball Heroes. This page is from "Jackie Robinson Breaks into the Majors."

One Jackie Robinson story among these issues is by an artist other than Weisbecker--"Jackie Robinson Carries the Pigskin" in #4.

Joe Louis #1 hasn't been scanned and put online yet, so its omission here doesn't mean Weisbecker didn't draw it. There's a bookseller's scan of page 1 that's obviously not by him, but a second look at the indicia shows that it's the Anglo-American version, and Canadian import laws meant they had to get the script redrawn by a Canadian artist. (The Grand Comics Database calls it a "reprint" but "remake" would be the better term.)

Clem Weisbecker pencils
on Fawcett sports and war

JACKIE ROBINSON

1949	(#1)	Jackie Robinson, Baseball Hero
Jul/50	#2	Jackie Robinson's First World Series
		Jackie Robinson and the Stolen Home Run
		Jackie Robinson and the Golden Cup
Sep/	#3	Jackie Robinson Breaks into the Majors
		Jackie Robinson Battles the Teen-Age Terror
		Jackie Robinson Rides the Whirlwind
Nov/	#4	Jackie Robinson Wins the Battling Crown
		Jackie Robinson and the Human Cat
1951	#5	Jackie Robinson and the Crucial Series
		Jackie Robinson and the Rookie on Trial
		Jackie Robinson, All American
1952	#6	Famous Plays by Jackie Robinson, Baseball Hero

JOE LOUIS

Nov/50

#2

Joe Louis, Champion of Champions

BASEBALL HEROES

1952

nn

The True Story of Baseball's Hall of Fame

BOB SWIFT, BOY SPORTSMAN

1951	#1	Bob Swift and the Big Horn Bonanza
		Bob Swift and the King of the Lake
July/	#2	Tiger on a Bait Rod
		The Thrill Killers of the North
Sep/	#3	Fishing in Another World
		Bear Tracks to Danger
Nov/	#4	Sahib's Sacrifice
		Cannibal Trout
Jan/52	#5	Sun, Surf and Stripers
		Bob Swift and the Spotted Killer

BILL BATTLE, THE ONE MAN ARMY

Oct/52	#1	I'm the Best There Is
		A Snowball in Hades
Dec/	#2	Six Feet Under
		Strictly a Southpaw
Feb/53	#3	Human Bazooka
		Death Takes a Furlough
Apr/	#4	Death Warrant
		It Ain't Always Hell

MASTER COMICS

Apr/53

#133

The Biggest Brass There Is [BILL BATTLE]

BATTLE STORIES

May/52	#3	Wanted: One MIG-15
Sep/	#5	They've Got to Kill Me!

SOLDIER COMICS

Mar/52	#2	No More Noise from Snafu
Sep/53	#11	Long Time No Sea! [BILL BATTLE]

Disc Jockeying Times Three, Not Two

A while ago I listed some of the teenager scripts that Jack Mendelsohn reworked at Tower from ones he’d written at Quality a decade earlier. One such pair was "Disc Jockeying" in CANDY 49 (July/54) and the story by the same title in GO-GO AND ANIMAL 2 (Oct/66). Now I’ve found an earlier source for the plot at DC--the untitled Liz story in SCRIBBLY 1 (Aug-Sep/48). They're in chronological order below: Liz, Candy, Go-Go. The heroine in each has thrown a platter party to replenish her record collection and every guest has brought a single with the same song.

The Go-Go script reworks the Candy one closely, but they don’t resemble the Liz one aside from the plot. Jack Mendelsohn was working at DC in 1948, or at least for Howie Post there, on Presto Pete and Jiminy and the Magic Book, but I can’t see any of his style in the Liz script.

Clem's Cap

Clem Weisbecker's handful of stories on Captain America are important because, of course, Captain America, and because they're a link between his earlier work at MLJ and later at Fawcett. (Another link is his late-Forties stories in Crime Must Pay the Penalty, at Ace, which have already been identified by James Vadeboncoeur, Jr.)

The page above is from "Scarface and the Script of Death." Some issues in this timeframe are online only as scans of old microfiche rather than of the actual comics, and the fuzziness makes it difficult to scrutinize the art. Inherent in the comics themselves is the number of different inkers. So Weisbecker may have more Cap stories, but these are the ones I can be sure enough of to list now, and not take another few weeks vacillating over some of the other stories.

Clem Weisbecker pencils on
CAPTAIN AMERICA

Nov/45	#50	The Walking Dead
Jan/46	#52	The Case of the Telepathic Typewriter
Feb/	#53	The Robe of Evil
		Murder Etched in Stone
Mar/	#54	Scarface and the Script of Death
Apr/	#55	The Hands of Sensitivo

on Captain America in
ALL SELECT

Sum/46

#10

Crime Takes a Cruise

Strange Tales by Jack Oleck

Two captions from "The Last of Mister Grimm" in Strange Tales #48 signal Jack Oleck's style: his version of Had-I-but-known, But he didn't think of that, at first! and one supplementing the description of action with two digressions into moralizing: Cowards die many times...greed is a mighty force!

After the cancellation of everything but MAD at EC in 1956, Oleck continued writing for Prize as he had been, and soon picked up work at Harvey and Timely/Atlas/pre-Marvel. At Atlas he was in on the early issues of new titles like World of Fantasy and World of Suspense. A look at a longer-running title like Strange Tales shows his tenure didn't predate those titles' mid-1956 beginnings.

The Comics Code was a good year old by the time Oleck started at Atlas. The Atlas Implosion took place with #58 (May/57), so as of #59 (Oct/57) scripts and art were out of inventory. The monster phase begins to show with #67 (Feb/59), with artists Jack Kirby and Don Heck becoming regulars, and newly written scripts by mostly Stan Lee and Larry Lieber becoming necessary.

Jack Oleck scripts
in Strange Tales

July/56	#48	The Last of Mister Grimm
Aug/	#49	The Animal
		The Man Who Cried
Dec/	#53	The Man Who Crushed Rocks
Jan/57	#54	Trapped in the Dark
Mar/	#56	Something Is on This Ship!
		Hide-Out
		Nothing Can Stop It
Apr/	#57	You Used to Be Me
		Murder on His Mind
Dec/	#60	Rude Awakening
Feb/58	#61	The Laundry Machines
		The Disappearing Man
		Menace of the Mirror
Apr/	#62	The Invaders
		It Happened That Night
		Alone in the Night
June/	#63	He Never Came Out
Oct/	#65	Afraid to Open the Door