Number 1488: Monsters of Karloff

Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery was a title of the 1970s from Gold Key/Whitman, which featured monster stories. What I remember about it from seeing it on the comic racks of its era was the art in each issue seemed uneven to me, a problem I found with most of the anthology comics of the time.

These two stories I found interesting and well drawn. “The Eternity Monster” is from issue #60 (1975), drawn by José Delbo; “The Axeman and the Taxman” is from #68 (1976) and identified (if you can call it that) as being by “West Coast artist?” by the Grand Comics Database.

There are more Boris Karloff monsters at Karswell’s The Horrors Of It All.
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Number 1487: Ellery Queen’s chain letter

The literary character, Ellery Queen, created by Manfred Lee and Frederick Dannay, was a detective who solved mysteries using deductive logic. The books I remembered always featured one of those scenes where all the suspects were placed in a room and Ellery would expose the killer. It’s been many years since I read an Ellery Queen novel, but I can tell you they weren’t like this story from Ziff-Davis’s Ellery Queen #1 (1951).

The premise is fairly simple, involving those obnoxious chain letters, scams that used snail mail years ago, and then through e-mail. But the ending is one of those “What th — !?” denouements that defies explanation. It comes out of left field, that’s for certain.

Grand Comics Database doesn’t have any guesses on the artist, nor do I.

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Ellery Queen, played by actor Jim Hutton, had a 22-episode run as a TV series in the 1975-76 television season. I enjoyed the show except for one episode, “The Adventure of the Comic Book Crusader,” putting Ellery at odds with a nasty cartoonist played by Tom Bosley, who is doing an Ellery Queen comic book. The story is set in 1947.

I watched the episode again recently as part of a DVD set of the series, and my opinion of the episode had not changed. The producers hired some hack to do the supposed “comic book” artwork, and said hack just swiped Jack Kirby. And poorly. My thought now, as then, was why didn’t they just hire Jack?

Not only that, they swiped the Raquel Welch pose from One Million B.C. for the poster of “Lola the Jungle Princess.”

How hard would it have been for someone on staff to do a little research in the production of comics to call DC or Marvel and ask how original comic artwork looks? The story presents the artwork as being large, loose individual panels, put together into page form. Not only did they not do even the most elementary research, they didn’t even do much studying of actual comic books, or they’d know that speech balloons and lettering aren’t this amateurish. A real-life letterer who turned in a job like this would have been fired on his first day.

It shows how much this television episode bothered me that nearly 40 years later I’m still bothered. Maybe at the time it was originally aired it gave some industry pros a few laughs.

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I featured the other story from this comic some time ago. Just click on the thumbnail.

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Number 1486: Another limb of the Superman family tree: Professor Supermind and Son

It’s widely believed that Philip Wylie’s 1931 novel, Gladiator, is the trunk of Superman’s family tree. In Gladiator Hugo Danner is raised by his father to be a super human, just as Superman is sent to Earth with superpowers by his father. So Professor Supermind and Son, who appeared in Dellְ’s Popular Comics, appear to be a branch of the same tree.

Professor Warren (no first name) and Dan Warren are the father-son team. Dan does some very Superman-like things with his powers, while Professor Warren exhibits an almost omniscient power to oversee events through his magical television. Like super vision it can apparently see everything, everywhere. The strip lasted 12 episodes in 1941 and ’42. I’ve mentioned before that Dell had its own set of superheroes, but dropped them long before superheroes stopped selling for other publishers. In the case of Professor Supermind and Son, I wonder if DC’s lawyers gave Dell Comics notice that they considered the strip to be infringing on Superman. There might be no evidence of such a contact, but the possibility, considering the litigious nature of the folks protecting Superman from imitators, is strong . That is, of course, without admitting Philip Wylie’s role in the whole genre.*

Artist on the first story, from Popular Comics #60, is Maurice Kashuba, and there is no artist listed for the second story, from Popular #61.

Thanks to Pappy’s Golden Age friend, Daniel, for pointing out that the original posting was out of sequence. I have corrected the error.

*According to reports, Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel said that Superman owed nothing to Gladiator, but author Wylie believed his novel was the inspiration.

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#653 - D237 The_Aeronaut

Here is the recently concluded Phantom Daily strip - The Aeronaut. Once again a contribution of the one and only Emile.

Download this story from Emile's original link and shower your thanks upon him

Enjoy,

Venkit

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Number 1485: Captain Midnight and the asteroid battle

In the 1940s travel into space in rocket ships was fantasy. It was science fiction, like that “crazy Buck Rogers stuff” from comic strips and comic books.

Some of that Buck Rogers stuff, from a 1951 1/3 page Sunday strip.

Captain Midnight, a comic book published by Fawcett, did resemble that “Buck Rogers stuff,” which is one of the reasons I like it. Rocket ships buzzing around in space, covering great distances with no more apparent concern than Earthly commuters driving from the suburbs to the city, hostile life on every planet, including asteroids (as in this story), and a stalwart hero who can whup on a whole planet full of hostiles, were a staple of such fantasies.

From Captain Midnight #54 (1947). Drawn by Leonard Frank.

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Here is the only other Captain Midnight story I’ve shown so far, a British reprint of another crazy science fiction tale. Just click the thumbnail:

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