DOUBLES: Doppelgangers, Mirrored Motifs, Before/After, & Total Plagiarism

[BangZoom]

 

I love that cover.

 

A friend of mine has a WWI poster which used the same image.

[Doohickamabob]

It occurs to me that Eerie #5, Eerie #9, and Eerie #13 have a couple of big things in common...

 

 

The two things I am talking about are her hand, and her earring. What did you think I was talking about?

[G.A.tor]

It occurs to me that Eerie #5, Eerie #9, and Eerie #13 have a couple of big things in common...

 

 

The two things I am talking about are her hand, and her earring. What did you think I was talking about?

skulls

[BB-Gun]

Another Baker Swipe by Johnson.

 

 

[BB-Gun]

It occurs to me that Eerie #5, Eerie #9, and Eerie #13 have a couple of big things in common...

 

 

The two things I am talking about are her hand, and her earring. What did you think I was talking about?

skulls

 

Isn't that middle cover a swipe from Disbrow? Looks like a splash page Jay drew for Blue Bolt Weird.

 

[Scrooge]

Saw this last week and forgot to post -

 

[Norrin_Radd]

Giant spiked shoe covers.

[Norrin_Radd]

Bullet hole covers.

 

[selegue]

Giant spiked shoe covers.

 

An eye-catching modern Atom cover by Bolland that I figure was inspired by those classic covers. (Will I get in trouble for posting a "modern" here?)

 

Long time no hear! I've been busy as @#$%^& lately.

 

Jack

 

 

 

[porcupine48]

this was a ton of fun to look through!

[tabcom]

 

Here is a recognizable image. From Captain Easy 1934

[BB-Gun]

It occurs to me that Eerie #5, Eerie #9, and Eerie #13 have a couple of big things in common...

 

 

The two things I am talking about are her hand, and her earring. What did you think I was talking about?

skulls

 

Isn't that middle cover a swipe from Disbrow? Looks like a splash page Jay drew for Blue Bolt Weird.

or maybe it was a swipe from Beware!

 

The cover on the right looks like a Frazetta swipe. Can't find that one right now but don't recognize the one on the left.

[BB-Gun]

Might as well get two biggies out of the way. These are two of my all-time favorite comic-book covers. I personally think Wonder Comics #15 is more alluring than Startling Comics #49, because of the colors and the creepy factor. It's obvious that Alex Schomburg used the same model/image for each, as the body position and many contours of the dress and figure line up exactly. The gun-shooting men also are similar.

 

 

By the way: Is a microscope really necessary to look at the woman's chest?

 

I think they were trying to draw a dissecting microscope but it looks more like a compound microscope used to study microbes or bacteria. Once the animal is sliced open a microscope is useful for finding the pancreas and other small organs amongst the goo.

bb

 

[G.A.tor]

xela aka schomburg

[rjpb]

I prefer the Wonder cover as well.

[BB-Gun]

I was reading Smash 10 and saw a familiar panel (panel 4). Looks like the Fine cover which was probably published after the Eisner panel.

Perhaps the machines and army coming out of the mouth of a fiery orator was a common theme back in the 1940s.

And Stalin and the attack of the Russian bear was a common theme too...until they became allies.

[BB-Gun]

I picked this cover up from Moondog recently and was suprised by how similar it was to Spiderman 77.

[BB-Gun]

I was reading Smash 10 and saw a familiar panel (panel 4). Looks like the Fine cover which was probably published after the Eisner panel.

Perhaps the machines and army coming out of the mouth of a fiery orator was a common theme back in the 1940s.

And Stalin and the attack of the Russian bear was a common theme too...until they became allies.

 

Added the other bear cover but I think the images may be just related due to the times.

[Doohickamabob]

VINTAGE PAPERBACK COVER ART THAT WAS RE-USED ON GOLDEN-AGE COMIC BOOKS

 

This thread hasn't gotten much activity for the last 2 years or so... I wanted to keep posting doppelganger comic covers but got side-tracked into everything else.

 

However, as I've been reading and collecting over the last year or so, I've been keeping several folders on my computer to drop images into. One thing I've been noticing is that many Avon and Realistic comics have covers taken from paperback books. Usually the books are Avon or Novel Library publications. I don't know much about the history of paperback publishers, but it seems the art department for the comics liked to tap into all the great art that was used for the paperbacks.

 

With that in mind, I decided to figure out all the comics that have such covers, and what books they came from. Two resources have proven indispensable. One is The Bookscans Database . This is an amazing resource if you want to find scans of nearly any vintage paperback. It's exhaustive! The only "problem" is that the scans are painstakingly laid out on web pages, rather than placed in an actual searchable database. But otherwise it's a fantastic site for anybody who loves vintage paperbacks and vintage-paperback art.

 

The other indispensable resource is something most people here already know about, The Grand Comic Books Database . When I wanted to look at every Avon comic to find out which ones might have covers taken from a paperback source, all I had to do was go to the GCBD, click on Avon publishers, and it showed me every title ever published by Avon. From there I could link to a gallery for that title and look over the cover art.

 

Comparing comic-book cover art to paperback cover art, just trying to find any cases where one matched the other, turned out to be a challenging treasure hunt. It took me a while but I think I tracked down 95% of the cases where a comic's cover came from a paperback cover. If I missed anything, and you know about it, please write here and tell me!

 

The most difficult proved to be the western-themed comics/books, because I have little interest in that genre and the cover art tends to look samey to me. I might have missed a few crossovers among the many Jesse James and Wild Bill Hickok titles. I also might have missed a few from The Saint.

 

Why did I bother doing this, you ask? Well....it was fun! I love vintage comic and paperback art. I kept noticing that certain Avon and other paperback covers were giving me a feeling of deja vu, and I also couldn't understand why many Avon comic covers were so inconsistent in style. So I put 2 and 2 together and figured I might as well share the results of my obsessive-compulsive research. I also owe some debt to the Search functionality of this site, including a post I dragged up from a few years ago by the user here named Scrooge, in which he listed several of the crossovers (some I'd already found, but several I had not).

 

In the next few messages, I will post images that put the comics and the paperbacks side-by-side. But first, here is the most classic and valuable paperback (or digest) turned comic book of all time:

 

[Doohickamabob]

Okay, so here are the first couple groups of images. The biggest genre to get the "repurposed image" treatment was romance. This is fine with me because many of the romance images contained sultry, noirish painting or photography that still holds up today in terms of sexiniess, allure and standing the artistic test of time. Even when it doesn't stand the test of time, it has a strange quality that makes it fun to browse.

 

Leading off is the Realistic Comics series of romance comics called "Intimate Confessions":

 

 

Intimate Confessions #1 is among my favorite among this group, with cover art that is instantly recognizable for the seductive streetwalker pose of the blonde in the red dress, who has one hand on her lower back and the other dangling a cigarette, while a landscape of neon lights sets the scene. What great art, courtesy of Nelson Algren's "The Neon Wilderness."

 

Intimate Confessions #2 is from Donald Henderson Clarke's "The Chastity of Gloria Boyd." Intimate Confessions #3 = Robert Briffault's "Carlotta." Intimate Confessions #4 = James Woolf's "Song Without Sermon."

 

 

Intimate Confessions #5 = "Her Private Passions" by Marty Holland.

Intimate Confessions #6 = "Alabam'" by Donald Henderson Clarke.

Intimate Confessions #7 = "Infidelity" by Arthur Weigal

Intimate Confessions #8 = "Babes and Sucklings" by Philip Wylie