Hiển thị các bài đăng có nhãn Sheldon Moldoff. Hiển thị tất cả bài đăng
Hiển thị các bài đăng có nhãn Sheldon Moldoff. Hiển thị tất cả bài đăng

Number 1509: Moon Girl and the day the world trembled

Người đăng: Unknown on Thứ Sáu, 17 tháng 1, 2014

Moon Girl was EC Comics’ answer to DC’s Wonder Woman, without the kinky stuff. My opinion is that Moon Girl was too tame. Maybe she needed something a bit kinky to bump up sales, but Moon Girl went into oblivion in the late forties, so it’s moot. You Golden Age fans remember that EC publisher Maxwell Charles Gaines had started All American Comics in a joint publishing venture with DC Comics, then ultimately sold it to DC. Gaines founded Educational Comics, EC, and ran it until his death in a boating accident in 1947. The rest of EC history is well known, and some of these early EC Comics are collectible because of being ancestors to the notorious later New Trend titles.

Sheldon Moldoff did the artwork for “The Day the World Trembled!” As you may also recall, he was with Gaines from the start, drawing Hawkman in Flash Comics. The story is the lead from Moon Girl, #6 (1949) the last issue under that title. Next two issues would be Moon Girl Fights Crime, then A Moon...a Girl...Romance, which eventually became Weird Fantasy, one of the more odd evolutions of titles in comics history.











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More Moon Girl here. Just click on the thumbnails.



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Number 1459: Shelly’s Hawkman

Người đăng: Unknown on Thứ Tư, 23 tháng 10, 2013

Sheldon Moldoff did the Hawkman feature for Flash Comics as on-the-job training. He started at age 18, and like many of his peers in those early days of comic books he swiped Flash Gordon poses.

I think the artist who created the costume (Dennis Neville?) put all of the subsequent Hawkman artists in a bind, because drawing him with the hawk head and wings was difficult and unwieldy. Years later the golden age Hawkman was given a superhero mask, but those wings remained.* I think an interesting critique of the Hawkman costume** is from 2011, by a commenter going by the name “meltdownclown” for Booksteve Thompson’s Four Color Shadows blog:
“To me, the wings always looked like rugs.

The wings will always be Hawkman's big problem. Those don't-try-it-at-home-kids nightmares are anchored to the center of his back by a harness that, by rights, should carve him into quarters in the first hard crosswind. And they must be great fun in any narrow space.”
You can see the 1942 story meltdownclown was commenting on in Steve’s blog here.

My post today is from Flash Comics #38 (1943):










*The original costume, hawk head and all, was resurrected by Joe Kubert for the silver age revival.

**Considering we’re talking about a comic book character, and in comic books all rules of realism can be broken.
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Number 1252: Two Halloween horrors!

Người đăng: Unknown on Chủ Nhật, 28 tháng 10, 2012

Halloween is Wednesday...and that means the little neighborhood beggers will be coming to the door for their tricks and their treats. I found a bag of forgotten jelly beans placed in a drawer a few years ago. The kids will have to settle for fifteen-year-old candy from Pappy!

I have two Fawcett horror stories to celebrate Halloween. First up, “The Thing From the Lake,” from Strange Stories from Another World #3 (1952). It's a tale of a castle, greed, and a slippery, slimy corpse using psychological torture as revenge. The sharp black-line artwork is from a downloaded version of the story done up as an online collection called Fawcett Classic Horror #2. Some good person (and thanks to him!) probably got the stories from UK or Australian comics, which printed them sans color.

Next up, from Beware! Terror Tales #5 (1953), a tale of a cursed clock, “Horrors of the 13th Stroke.” The Grand Comics Database lists ? as the artist on this tale. Karswell of The Horrors of It All showed his scans of the story almost four years ago, in January 2009, so I feel it's time (get it? Clock? Time?) to see it again. As a bonus, the nifty cover from the issue is drawn by Bernard Baily, who did some great horror covers of the pre-Code era.






















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Number 1185: Mooning the cyclops

Người đăng: Unknown on Thứ Hai, 2 tháng 7, 2012


Moon Girl, the Pre-Trend EC Comics' version of Wonder Woman, fights off the cyclops, who has escaped from the prison, "miles inland on the island of Sicily," where he has been since Ulysses put him there. Having been out of action for a couple of thousand years at least, ol' One-Eye needs to eat. He grabs a shipload of grub before rising up sometime later on an American beach.

The story is from Moon Girl and contains at least one major howler: When meeting Moon Girl's enemy, the Professor, the caption reads, "In archaic Latin, the one-eyed giant speaks . . ." Maybe to 1948 comic book readers archaic Latin and archaic Greek were the same. But I'm surprised it slipped by even the most lax editor. That editor would have been William M. Gaines, as the indicia credit reads. Gaines took over Moon Girl from his father, Maxwell Charles Gaines, who had started Educational Comics after DC bought out his share of their publishing empire, All American Comics. The elder Gaines* had died in the summer of 1947, leaving the publishing company to his wife and son.

From Moon Girl #4 (1948), drawn by Sheldon Moldoff:











*The elder Gaines had also been the original publisher of Wonder Woman. Moon Girl was never close to being as bizarre as Wonder Woman, a comic in a class all its own. On Sunday, July 8, I'll be featuring a wild story featuring our favorite Amazon.
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