Early Gill at Timely? Or Too Early?

"Vanishing Oil Tank Cars" is the Human Torch story in All Select Comics 3, Spring/1944.

Compare the upper right-hand caption in the Torch section with the one in the same upper right-hand corner on this page of The Hidden Kingdom" in Charlton's Jungle Jim 24, June/1969 (art by Pat Boyette).

My instinct is to attribute the Torch story to the writer credited on the Jungle Jim one: Joe Gill. Gill is known to have worked at Marvel in the Forties and Fifties, before going to Charlton. The one thing that gives me pause is not knowing when he returned from the service. The Who's Who has him starting at Marvel around 1945, which I don't take as hard and fast, but a story published with a Spring '44 cover date would have to be written in late 1943. Does anybody know when Joe Gill got home from the Pacific?

Speed Carter, Spaceman Writer

Hank Chapman's getting writing credits at Timely/Atlas in the Fifties puts him ahead of all the other writers except Stan Lee, but the crediting was inconsistent. Spaceman shows this: Chapman's name appears on just two stories, the second and third ones in issue 3, but he scripted the entire series.

The splash page layouts that I mentioned in my post on the Human Torch stories written by Chapman appear among these stories: a splash panel taking almost the entire page, with one story panel; and a tier of story panels before the splash.

The contemporary-sounding "Holy smokes" in Chapman's Torch and mystery stories doesn't appear here; the futuristic "Great galaxy" and "Holy atoms" substitute. "Ow-w-w," with some variations of length and hyphenation, appears throughout.

The Famous Explorers of Space back-ups take place in Speed Carter's past. The Eadeh and Savage art guesses I pass along from the GCD.

Speed Carter, Spaceman—written by Hank Chapman

Sept/53	#1	Speed Carter, Spaceman, and the Pirate Planet	a: Joe Maneely
		Slaughter on a Star	a: Maneely
		The Robots' Revenge	a: Maneely
Nov/53	#2	[The Birdmen of Uranus]	a: Maneely
		The Half-Horrors of Hyades	a: Maneely
		Who Stole the Sun	a: Maneely
Jan/54	#3	[Grave-Robbers from Outer Space]	a: Maneely
		[The Core People]	a: Maneely
		[The Bems]	a: Maneely
Mar/54	#4	[The Positpeople and the Neganatives]	p: Mike Sekowsky  i: Jack Abel
		[The Jet-Men]	p: Sekowsky  i: Abel
		[The Mosquito Men]	p: Sekowsky  i: Abel
May/54	#5	Die, Spaceman, Die!	a: George Tuska
		[Beastmen of Space]	a: Tuska
		A Slaughter in Space	a: Tuska
July/54	#6	The Thing in Outer Space	a: Bob Forgione
		The Kiss of Death	a: Forgione
		[Spaceworld of the Scorpeople]	a: Forgione

Famous Explorers of Space in Spaceman—written by Chapman

Sept/53	#1	Venus: Earth's Twin Sister	a: John Romita
Nov/53	#2	Mercury: The Red-Hot Planet	p: Bill Benulis  i: Abel
Jan/54	#3	Mars: The Dying Planet	a: Al Eadeh?
Mar/54	#4	Jupiter: The Giant Planet	a: Maneely
May/54	#5	Ceres: The Biggest Little World in the Asteroid Belt	a: Bill Savage?
July/54	#6	How Saturn Got Its Fourth Ring	a: Benulis

The First Human Torch Writer (of the Fifties)

Hank Chapman wrote the Human Torch in the Forties, if only as one of those remembered pitching in on the marathon weekend putting together a Torch/Sub-Mariner battle issue. I haven't yet run across his other stories in that decade. Luckily for me in tracking down his style, Chapman in a number of Fifties stories at Timely/Atlas was uncharacteristically (for a writer at the time) given a credit line. He was probably best known for his war stories, and he continued writing that genre in the Sixties at DC.

Uncredited, Chapman wrote the first two Torch stories in the Fifties revival, in Young Men 24 (Dec/53) and 25 (Feb/54).

Art on the YM 24 story is by Russ Heath, with the exception of a splash panel pasteover of the Torch by Carl Burgos.

The first clue to Chapman's writing a story is "Ow-w-w"—most often hyphenated exactly like that, but not always. That's best as an indication when the other writers at the particular company and time aren't using it, of course. And "Holy Smokes" in the splash panel helps lead me to Chapman here. The following panels are from a story with Chapman's credit line, "My Brother . . . the Ghoul" in Adventures into Weird Worlds 6 (May/52), with art by George Roussos.

Another occasional clue to Chapman is seen by comparing the first page of Young Men 25's Torch story with the first page of "My Brother . . . the Ghoul" (and note "Holy Smokes" again in the Torch splash).

The tier of panels before the splash in each case is something Chapman uses off and on; also, for that matter, the splash with a single story panel following, as in YM 24.

Other writers did the rest of the superhero stories in Atlas's short-lived revival experiment of the mid-Fifties.

Bill Finger on Captain America Again

"Beware the Medicine Man" in Captain America 57 (July/46) is another Timely script by Bill Finger that I just found.

Something he uses here that so far I've seen from no other writer is "Arumph" for "Harrumph."

Other stylistic indicators in this Cap story that Finger has used elsewhere are:

"Atchoo"
"____, but fast!"
colorful figure
lash out
Later...in ____...
Meantime, in ____...
Nightfall...____...
"Ooh"
sturdy figure

And captions beginning with gerunds: Scanning the paper, ____...

The Cap artist here is Maurice del Bourgo, who did Green Arrow and Mike Gibbs: Guerrilla at DC; at Timely he also drew Mr. Wu in All Select 11 and Blonde Phantom 12.(The Batman art on "The Case of the Honest Crook" in Batman 5, Spr/41, is by Bob Kane and Jerry Robinson.)

"The Private Life of Captain America" Writer

The writer of "The Private Life of Captain America" in CA 59 (Nov/1946) is exactly the one you'd guess by that first caption.

Batman co-creator Bill Finger is known to have written, for Timely, the All Winners Squad story in All Winners 19 (Fall/46). In the Who's Who of American Comic Books, Captain America is listed as another feature he wrote for the company.

Two years later, Finger would write "The Origin of Batman" (Batman 47, June-July/48) and "The Origin of Superman" (Superman 53, July-Aug/48) at DC, each of which would recount the origin and add some new twist—in the first case, Batman's finding his parents' killer, Joe Chill; in the second, Superman's first encounter with Kryptonite and learning he's from Krypton. The Captain America story, after recounting the origin, sets up Steve Rogers as a teacher at the Lee School, with Bucky a student (they're already civilians before the story begins) and then gives them a new case. I don't know who the artist is; the entire origin section is swiped, and I would imagine with editorial approval, from Kirby & Simon in CA 1.

Some of Finger's stylistic tells that I've found in various of his stories, and that he uses in this Cap one, are:

action garb
"Big boy"
Bop
"H'ya"
"It seems ___"
"Jeepers"
Later...___...
"a look-see"
a melee ensues
Meantime, ___...
"Ooh"
A quick change of [costume] and...
sprint
swing into action
unleash a sledge-hammer blow
vital people
"We-ell"
"Yow"
"Y'see"

And there's a cutaway diagram.

You can see that the more indications of style match up, the better; otherwise you might assume John Stanley wrote this story. "Yow!"

Another Cap story that I can attribute to Bill Finger is "The Sportsman of Crime" in CA 58 (Sept/46). The flashback caption starting "So-and-so's story: '____'" is a Fingerism found in a number of Batman stories.