Number 1153: “Off to the bounding sea, a pirate's life for me.”

Người đăng: Unknown on Thứ Hai, 7 tháng 5, 2012



Pirates Comics was a short-lived attempt to make pirates the stars of their own comic book series. It didn't work. Pirates Comics, published by Hillman in 1950, sank to Davy Jones' Locker after four issues.

The first issue had a couple of nicely illustrated stories by artist Mike Suchorsky, which I'm posting here.* Suchorsky is an artist whose history I've found difficult to research. Google Mike Suchorsky and you come up with a current musician (and who knows, he could be a relative of the comic book Suchorsky), but information on the earlier Suchorsky is sparse. Here's what I remember from my reading over the past few years: Suchorsky worked in comic books in the '40s and early '50s, before being killed in a boating or fishing accident. When word got out that he had died he was relatively unknown, even within the comics community, and some thought it was Mike Sekowsky who had succumbed.

What we have are stories identified by comic book art spotter-general, Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr., pointing out those stories drawn by Suchorsky. Suchorsky was a skilled illustrator, someone you would think would have been working in advertising, magazine illustration, or at the very least his own syndicated comic strip. We'll never know because he died early.

If anyone can shed any more light on this artist please write me. I am interested in knowing more and passing along any information to my readers.



















*"Sea Witch" is by an unknown scripter, but "Alpha, The Slave Pirate" is written by Jack Oleck, according to the Grand Comics Database.
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Number 1152: Out of this world with Buster Brown and Tige

Người đăng: Unknown on Chủ Nhật, 6 tháng 5, 2012


The original Buster Brown Comic Book, with adventure stories and continuing features, was published until issue #43 in 1956. After that the direction of the comic was changed  This particular issue, produced by ACG subsidiary Custom Comics, Buster Brown in "Out of This World!" (1959), was probably written by ACG editor Richard E. Hughes but drawn by . . . whom?

The Grand Comics Database equivocates. On the one hand they say the cover is by Kurt Schaffenberger?, but even though it's the same artwork as the inside they drop the name and just give us the ?  I'll leave it up to you art spotters and Schaffenberger fans. Is it by Kurt?

Karswell showed the 1958 edition of the Buster Brown giveaway in his And Everything Else Too blog. You can check it out here. Despite a similar outer space theme to the 1959 issue the artwork is completely different.

UPDATE: After getting a comment on a possible artist from comics historian Alberto Becatini, he says this is the work of Dan Gordon, an animator who did many comics for ACG in the forties and fifties.

ANOTHER UPDATE (May 23, 2012): Just heard that funny animal comics expert and artist Jim Engel says the artist is Ken Hultgren, another of the animator-comic book artists who did so much for ACG, and who was a contemporary of Dan Gordon. This puts me in a quandary. I trust both of these men and their comic art knowledge, and all I can do is present their opinions.

















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Flash Gordon - S047 The Mind (1953-09-20 to 1954-01-17)

Người đăng: Unknown on Thứ Bảy, 5 tháng 5, 2012

Story & Art: Mac Raboy 
Original run: 1953-09-20 to 1954-01-17
Summary:  Receiving a visit from Flash at his Earth laboratory, Dr. Zarkov proudly shows off his latest project: a single-seater space ship designed for a reconnaissance flight of Jupiter's fourth moon Callisto.
Happily accepting the chance to man the first solo flight into outer space ever, Flash soon lands near a sprawling city on Callisto, but is severely warned by a lone eremite to beware of “the city of doomed souls”...
(Source of summary: www.ipcomics.net) 


 All credits go to "spax".
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Number 1151: Ma Barker Beamus and her gang

Người đăng: Unknown on Thứ Sáu, 4 tháng 5, 2012


If you only knew the late Shelly Moldoff from his ghosting of Bob Kane's Batman from the years 1953-'67 you might not recognize him in this lively, action-packed strip from Underworld True Crime Stories #2, (1948). In Batman Shelly's style was very stiff, but there is a certain freedom in "Mother Knows Best" that he didn't show in Batman.

"Mother Knows Best" is a fictional version of the infamous real-life Barker-Karpis gang, notorious in the lawless era of the early '30s. Kate "Ma" Barker was said to be the head of the gang, training her boys to be criminals and killers. Ma Barker was killed in a shoot-out with FBI men. Author Bryan Burrough, who wrote one of the definitive books on that age, Public Enemies, claims that Ma was just a grandmother who went along with whatever her family was doing, living off the money they heisted. (No Social Security in those days!) The killing of an old woman in a shootout would have outraged the public had not J. Edgar Hoover created an evil persona for her. The story, embellished several times by Hoover, has come down that Ma Barker was a criminal mastermind, when the public record proves she was anything but. What the comic book scripter did was create a character like Hoover's legendary Ma Barker, and a story loosely based on the crimes of the Barker-Karpis gang.

Sheldon Moldoff died on February 29, 2012, at age 91.











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Flash Gordon - S052 - The Altered Past (1955-01-16 to 1955-03-27)

Người đăng: Unknown on Thứ Năm, 3 tháng 5, 2012

Story & Art: Mac Raboy
Original run: 1955-01-16 to 1955-03-27
Summary: Landing on Earth after their reluctant visit to a slave planet (S-051 Child Men and Giants), Flash and Dr. Zarkov suddenly find themselves confronted by prehistoric monsters from a world long gone by.
Unbeknown to the two baffled Earthmen, aliens from the distant star Antomni have set a plan in motion to colonise Earth by reversing the evolution of man and mutate its inhabitant to more controllable life fo rms...
(Source of summary: www.ipcomics.net)

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All credits go to "spax".
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Flash Gordon - S046 Titan (1953-06-07 to 1953-09-13) (Complete)

Người đăng: Unknown on Thứ Tư, 2 tháng 5, 2012

Hoping you'll like to read Sunday strips by Mac Raboy (S45 to S106).
S45, S46 (3 missing pages) & S94 were already shared.

Story & Art: Mac Raboy
Original run: 1953-06-07 to 1953-09-13
Summary: Settling down on Earth after his brush with interplanetary piracy, (S-045 Moon Pirates), Flash is offered, and eagerly accepts, the leadership of a fact-finding expedition to a recently sighted satellite behind the Moon.
Blasting off from Earth, Flash and his party land on the unexplored celestial body, but soon the expedition turns into a fight for survival as the environment seems to close in on the hapless visitors and a menacing presence is seen lurking nearby...
(Source of summary: www.ipcomics.net)


All credits go to "spax".

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Number 1150: “I Prowl At Night!”

Người đăng: Unknown


No, the headline doesn't have anything to do with an after-dark hobby of window-peeping, but of a werewolf, born of a traffic accident.

It's by one of the Atlas Comics greats, Syd Shores. I've shown this before, years ago, but decided it was worth re-scanning and re-posting.

It has off-register color printing, but after a lifetime of hating that part of the cheap-and-dirty production of comic books, I've come lately to think of bad printing as having a charm of its own. It means that comics were produced as throwaway items, more like advertising pamphlets than as the desirable collectibles we think of today. It shows that what is junk to one generation becomes a treasure in the future. If you'd been around in the '40s and '50s buying cheap stuff, like comics, and storing them away unread, your children today would be thanking you for your foresight.

From Astonishing #16 (1952):







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