A Curt Swan Crime Story with a Tiny Difference

Curt Swan was a mainstay at DC for some four decades. Along with his superhero and war strips for them in the early Fifties, Curt Swan worked on the company's Gangbusters and other crime features.

But this Swan-pencilled story, "Killer at Large," was published in Crime Cases 25 (Nov/50)—from Timely/Atlas/Marvel.

Sub-Mariner Artist Draws David Bruce Banner's Lookalike

If at first you don't succeed in identifying an artist on a comic book, keep on looking at other comics, and maybe when you go back to that first one you'll have run across some clue and a light bulb will go on.

The Courtship of Eddie's Father (2 issues, Jan/70 and May/70),  a TV tie-in from Dell, stumped me and others. The best I could come up with was that the artist wasn't Jack Sparling.

In the time since, I IDed the artist on a DC romance story by some girls' faces—

—comparing here from my July 9, 2015 post a page from "Two Hearts on a Tree" in Secret Hearts 121 (July/67) with a tier from Carl Pfeufer's known work on Super Green Beret 1 (June/67) at Milson.

Who was expecting Carl Pfeufer at Dell, 1970? He drew all the stories in the two issues of The Courtship of Eddie's Father; D. J. Arneson wrote them.

Suuuuper Realism (Comparatively) on Ricky Nelson

Pete Alvarado strayed over from animated-style comics (I associate him best with Andy Panda and Charlie Chicken among the many, many features he did) to pencil, and for all I know ink, the first issue of Dell's Ricky Nelson (Four Color 956, Dec/58) spinning off from the TV sitcom "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet." Russ Manning drew the fourth issue, and in between--who knows?

The best way to recognize an artist's work when he may be trying to match the models in a tie-in is to look at secondary characters--note the soda jerk Sam here. Still, Alvarado's characteristic finger shapes and arm positioning do show up at times on Ricky, as in the first panel here. The silhouette in the final panel is also a giveaway.

Alvarado would do Dell's first three issues of The Three Stooges in a style closer to animation cartooning, even though Moe, Larry, and Curly Joe are as "real" as Ricky Nelson.

Norm DiPluhm: D. J. Arneson

After the nom de plume "Norm DiPluhm" at Charlton was attributed by fans to Steve Skeates, he spent years explaining that it wasn't him.

Rip Jagger's recent post on his blog about DiPluhm's Phantom stories reminded me of who the writer really is—the splash page to "Skyjack" that Rip uses as his illustration has the Ghost Who Walks saying "Great Scot" with one "t" rather than the more common "Great Scott." That and other markers unlike Skeates' identify the writer as D. J. Arneson. (He also wrote as DiPluhm for Go-Go and Abbott and Costello, two titles Skeates worked on, which may help explain those fans' thought processes). This example is from "The Giant Ape of Thawth."

Phantom stories written by D. J. Arneson
* = credited (as "Norm DiPluhm")

Aug/69	33	The Phantom's Death
Oct/	34	The Cliff Kingdom	*
		The Giant Ape of Tawth
Feb/70	36	The River That Never Ends	*
		Very Special Timber	*
Apr/	37	Bandar Betrayers	*
		Skyjack	*
		Disband the Patrol!	*
Jun/	38	The Dying Ground	*
		The Phantom's New Faith
		The Trap

That's the entirety of Arneson's Phantom stories. On Ghostly Tales here are the stories that jumped out at me in flipping through the entire run for my own indexing; there may be a few more.

Ghostly Tales by Arneson
* = credited (as "DiPluhm")

Oct/67	63	Up on the Mountain
Feb/68	65	The Phantom Crew	*
May/	66	Water, Water, Everywhere	*
Sept/	68	Yo Ho Ho and a Dead Man's Jest
Nov/	70	Pop Goes Popolos

Working Backwards from the Who's Who--Sam Citron

The Who's Who credits Sam Citron with Girls' Love Stories 1968 at DC. It gives him stories at Gold Key around the same time  in Ripley's Believe It or Not and The Twilight Zone. On the Grand Comics Database the latter stories, uncredited in the comics themselves, have been identified. But possibly the art spotters who paid attention to the weird anthologies at one company didn't cross over to the romance ones at another.

That art of Citron's for Girls' Love Stories is on "Don't Leave Me Again" in number 138 (Oct/68). As with the Gold Key stories, he's inking himself here; at ACG three or four years earlier, all his stories (credited in the comics, as per usual at that company), were inked by Pete Costanza or Tom Hickey. This story's splash page has been correctly noted in the GCD as a reprint of the Infantino & Giordano cover.

I spent some time looking though the Sixties DC romance books to see if Citron had any work obscured by inkers, but finally had to admit to myself that the handful I found were by perhaps Werner Roth or Tony Abruzzo. DC did try to homogenize art into a house style at times via the inking.

Carl Memling Suspense Stories

A feature of Charlton's Lawbreakers Suspense Stories and its retitling, Strange Suspense Stories, for awhile was the contest where readers provided a solution to an unfinished story; that synopsis would be scripted and illustrated in a later issue. The odd thing is that Carl Memling scripted five of the solutions but only one of the unfinished story/solution pairs.

"What Was in Sam Dora's Box?" (art by Steve Ditko) recycles a gimmick from an EC story but the pun in the character's name is what's of interest here; compare with the (better) pun for Memling's story "Appointment with Sam Mara" in Dell's Ghost Stories 4 Oct-Dec/63).

Memling's stories may start in #11, which I haven't seen.

Written by Carl Memling:
Lawbreakers Suspense Stories

May/53	12	Breakout
		Murder on Rye
July/	13	Death Raps Twice
		Escape from the Noose
		Change in Script
Sep/	14	Man Overboard
		The Last Drop
		Richard Capp's Solution to "Murder on Rye"
Nov/	15	Out of the Frying Pan

Strange Suspense Stories

Mar/54	17	Beautiful Night for Murder
		10¢ Worth of Doom
May/	18	What Was in Sam Dora's Box?
		Caroline Denver's Solution to "Face to Face"
		Dead Right
Jul/	19	All Burnt Up
Aug/	20	The Payoff
		Donald Coronado's Solution to "Moment of Decision"
Sep/	21	Mary Lou Wachtel's Solution to..."Prize Package"
Nov/	22	Malcolm Hutcher's Solution to..."The Kill"

Spyman

How much Jim Steranko contributed to the published stories of the characters he created for the Harvey Thrillers begs two questions: how many scripts did he submit and how many were used? Steranko's scripts on Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD, are much more in the Marvel style than anything at Harvey, so although there isn't a lot that lets me say "The Birth of a Hero" is written by Steranko, there's nothing that leads to any other writer.

Look through France Edward Herron's credited work at DC on Blackhawk and Challengers and you'll find "Kwhamma" a lot.

Otto Binder's attributions for the back-up pieces in the Thrillers line seem to have morphed into credits for the main features, but I can't find him on Spyman, for one. I can't even find his style on the Eye Spy backup in #1.

Nick Caputo gives Mike Esposito as a possibility for the inks for the first part of Tuska's story. A CGD guess at the second part's inks is Carl Pfeufer.

I suspect the intro pages on the Thrillers are more likely written by editor Joe Simon than by the main-feature writers.

Spyman

Sept/66	#1	The Birth of a Hero	w: Jim Steranko?
			p: George Tuska
Dec/	#2	The Hand Is Quicker Than the Monster	w: Ed Herron
			a: Dick Ayers
Feb/67	#3	Death of Spyman	w: Herron  a: Bill Draut

Spyman backups

Sept/66	#1	Eye Spy and His Gal Friday...Jane Blond	w: Dick Wood??  a: ?
Dec/	#2	You Push a Button [ROBOLINK]	w: Otto Binder
			a: Carl Pfeufer
Feb/67	#3	Campy Champ: The Terrific Teen	w: Binder  a: Pfeufer