In the Shadow of the Atomic Age 6 6

[damonwad]

50 minutes ago, Scrooge said:

Tarzan # 27 - Cover and panels

Tarzan steps into his role and landlord of the jungle when a harvesting / logging party works outside of its authorized boundaries. This irks the apes who go on a rampage so to add insult to injury, now Tarzan has to rescue them on top of their transgression. Needless to say, no long-term relationship comes out of this encounter.

Cover -

Here's Tarzan, landlord of the jungle, requesting paperwork. This jungle is very organized! -

I never cease to be impressed with the background Marsh is producing. They don't have to be very realistic but he manages to make us feel we are there in the thick of a forest, here when the apes hurry to the logging camp. I really like the blues that the Dell colorists applied to the night scenes in these comics -

In these early issues, unlike later on IIRC, Marsh uses a lot of shading on the characters themselves, in a "old" style that he will drop off and that artists drop off as well -

I also look fondly at how March depicts children. He gets a chance one in a while with Boy and in this story with the child of the logging foreman -

Here are a couple of panels from Brothers of the Spear. Notice the texture of the forest in the background and how the figure works pops out in this panel, very nice contrast -

And I'll leave off with a page-wide panel from Brothers of the Spear -

 

"Tarzan, landlord of the jungle".  

[adamstrange]

On 12/7/2020 at 12:17 PM, Scrooge said:

And I'll leave off with a page-wide panel from Brothers of the Spear -

 

Great examples, Scrooge.  Roy Crane had a similar ability to depict jungle foliage but required more complicated, multi-layer background effects to produce it.

[Tri-Color Brian]

Dinosaur cover...

[Tri-Color Brian]

Tarzan swims with the fishes...

[Scrooge]

Switching it up a bit, moving away from Tarzan but staying firmly in Adventure mode - 

Slim package @ 36 pages but since it is itself an advertising medium, there are no ads, all stories, those listed on the cover, clocking in at 9, 10 and 9 pages respectively.

First and best story is this nice work by Dan (& Sy?) Barry - an island adventure.

The middle story takes place in India after the war and our main cast is very much in the Canniff mode. GCD suggests Fred Kida as the artist. The combination of Barry and Kida make this book feel like a Hillman production -

Final story is again by Barry - The splash is a variation of the cover and the story is its own version of Lost Horizon. In this version, a valley gets closed up to the rest of the world and is dominated by Genghis Khan warrior's descendants -

Since the premium was distributed to shoe stores, you can travel through American towns of the late '40's with these comics. Here we are in Henderson, Ky, on Main Street.

First in a couple of postcards -

and then a couple of photos from the '60's. Couldn't locate Danny's Shoppe though. There is one shoe store visible on the last photo - a Miller-Jones Shoes store.

Edited December 12, 2020 by Scrooge

[adamstrange]

29 minutes ago, Scrooge said:

Edited 23 minutes ago by Scrooge

Great line of cars! 

[Scrooge]

Animal Comics # 26 - Same vintage as the Buster Brown: Buster Brown is Spring 1947 and Animal Comics is April-May 1947

Honestly, I thought I'd enjoy this comic more than I actually did. It's a great package in concept, a mix of features with a solid artistic line-up. It's just that the stories simply did not live up to my expectations.

First up is Pogo but that's just a feature I have never really found interesting. I can deal with the absurd, maybe, but layer on top the affected language and I completely check out if the feature. This was not for me.

Second is Jigger (and Mooch) by Stanley, meh. I like the style on the story, it's different than much anything else in periodical comics at the time; the story falls flat though. There is nothing to make Jigger attractive to us so when he takes advantage of Mooch and we cannot even have time to empathize with Mooch, I finished the story wondering what the point was about. Same with the Uncle Wiggily, one of the weakest such effort I've read.

Thank goodness, this comic includes work by Dan Noonan and Mo Gollub, redemption for the issue.

Noonan takes us to Cuba with Rover and his owners Red and Mike and we have short bursts of action interspaced with calm meanderings in local landscapes. That satisfies me when done expertly -  

A few panels later -

Gollub is assigned a short historical feature on whaling, a little history mixed with technical guide. If well executed, it's a page turner. Gollub delivers -

and 

 

[creaturefan95]

Edited May 7, 2021 by creaturefan95
war is hell

[Scrooge]

Chip'n'Dale # 7 -

The amount of information and the leve of effort by indexers in the GCD never ceases to amaze. I tried my hands at indexing for the site years ago on some Modern series but the time commitment necessary never matched my drive to contribute. So, when I see how complete the listing for such a comics as Chip'n'Dale # 7 is, my hat is off to the contributors!

Behind the Eisenberg cover lies mostly Bradbury's work on the chipmunks with Murry on the 3 little pigs short.

I am finally catching up with Alter Ego # 168 - March 2021 with its interview of Willie Ito. In it, Ito relates that while at Chouinard School of Art in LA, Chase Craig, West Coast editor for Dell, came to the school and requested cover gag concepts from him (and maybe other students). So, who knows, maybe this is based on one of his submissions. Side note: in the interview, Ito mentions that once released from Camp Topaz, he bought 2 copies of the comics he got from newsstands: one to collect and one to read and share with friends. That would be right in the post-war years ~ 1945 and up. Again, evidence of collector mentality reaching back to that time period.

The stories are okay. Chip'n'Dale's relationship with DD is probably a reflection of the adverserial nature of their shorts together so it's always mano a mano in those stories and it is rather tiresome since the personalities of all parties are boiled down to their worst traits.

When the protagonists are different, Chip'n'Dale are still rascals but can be swayed as in this reaction when they need to rise to the occasion and do -

Here's an "action" sequence from one story, still Bradbury artwork - that's a cool shark in the 3rd tier -

[Scrooge]

Back to Buster Brown, # 17 this time.

TBH, I goofed. I thought Barry's work ran from # 1 to # 17 but it turns out that Barry is already out of the book with # 17. I should have checked better on GCD since it does credit the stories here to Willner and Elkan - GCD :: Issue :: Buster Brown Comic Book #17 (comics.org). Both had been assisting Barry in some of the issues leading to this taking over. It's a good exercise though to see how different the work looks once the inker takes over solo. In this instance, it's a step down.

Both Willner's and Elkan's careers are covered in David Saunders' site. Here's Willner - Catalog (pulpartists.com) and here's Elkan - Catalog (pulpartists.com)

 The book starts with the adventures of Smilin' Ed and his gang: Midnight, the cat, Squeaky, the mouse and Froggy, the Gremlin (source of mischief). This story takes us to the circus. All dramatis personae are in the panel below -

Next up is Willner on The Sultan's Ruby. This is the story from the cover. It involves a courier for a ruby, a stolen stallion, misplaced accusations and eventual truth coming out. The cover is a good reflection of one key scene from the story -

 

The final story is by Elkan - Sargasso Derelict. A family on their way to America is marooned and finds safety in the Sargasso Sea amid a ships' graveyard where a mysterious figure looms. Here he is in a panel that feels Eisneresque to me (potential swipe?). The anatomy and body position is probably off or impossible but the page-wide panel is still effective -

This copy advertises Schuster's out of Milwaukee.

Here's the exterior (from 1908) and the interior (from 1934) -

and here's a photo with Santa from the annual Christmas parade Schuster's sponsored (from 1950) -

 

 

 

Edited May 7, 2022 by Scrooge

[adamstrange]

On 5/6/2022 at 11:19 PM, Scrooge said:

Here he is in a panel that feels Eisneresque to me (potential swipe?).

My mind went there even before reading your comment.  And that's one flexible dude!