Yippeekayay, cowpunchers!

Friday Comic Book Day.

Yesterday I showed some of Erwin Hasen's often unmentioned first newspaper strip The Goldbergs. Another big chunck of his career that doesn;t get mentioned a lot is the fact that in the early fifties he drew a lot of comedy fillers for DC, mostly for the western titles. Maybe because they don't feature superheroes? At any rate, they show a side of his talent not often seen. I only have to for now, but will add more later.

And here they are:

Momma's Family

Thursday Story Strip Day.

Today, when I am doing this post a day late, the news arrived that Golden Age creator Erwin Hasen has died at the age of 94 in New York. Never a superhero fan, I knew him primarily from his newspaper strip Dondi, which ran from 1955 until 1986. It was one of the last comic strips to be shown in a full page (tabloid) version in most papers and as such it illustrated the inderlying principle of this blog: that the fifties were far from the wasteland artisticly as it is often made out to be. Most newspaper strip historian bemoan the fact that full page strips disappeared after the forties (except for Prince Valiant), while in fact many full page strip were introduced in the fifties (though mostly in tabloid form, which in itself usually was a reformatted version of the half page three tier form). In fact, the fifties can actually be seen as the decade of the three tier - a from I find even more satisfying than the standing page graphically. Many of the reformatted strips, such as Pogo, King Aroo, George Wunder's Tery and the Pirates, The Heart of Juliet Jones, Long Sam, Tarzan, Johnny Reb, Sherlock Holmes and in fact Dondi, read better in the three tier form, which has more options for wider panels. The only exception would be Lance, which like Valiant, has the text underneath the action.

One of the main atractions for me in Dondi, is the Milt Caniff roots of Hasen's style. He soon gets a lot looser, though. That doesn't always work for me. And the sentimental tone of the orphan runaway theme is not my cup of tea either. But I do have the collection from Classic Comic Press and enjoyed it a lot. I can recommend it to everyone, especially today.

Two years ago I attended a panel at the New York Comicon taht featured Al Jaffee and Erwin Hasen. When he took the stage, Hasen stole the show with one surefire anecdote after the other. He told us about an earlier newspaper strip effort, I didn't yet know about. After the war, he was asked by popular comedienne Gertrude Berg, the Jewish momma at the heart of the radio comedy The Goldbergs to draw her comic strip. He did so for more than a year., slowly learning his trade.

When I got back home, I immediately sought the strip and I was lucky enough to find a run on the Fulton History site, where they have newspapers from the New York area that you can access to have postcard made. The interface is very slow and hard to navigate for anyone looking for something in particular, but I did get th emajority of the episodes. Ever since then, I am working to clip the strips from that mountain of scans. To honor Mr. Hasen, here is what I have so far.

The earliest samples are from 1944.

Here are one from a year later.

And these are even from 1948.

Debatable art

Friday Comic Book Day.

A discussion on the Mort Meskin Group at Yahoo Groups over a particulary well drawn science fiction story from the early fifties, made me have another look t what I have from publisher Ziff-Davis. They were big players in the field of pulps, but in the late forties (I guess) they decded to try their hand at doing comics. This was when the superheroes were dying out and they tried to do a number of more pulpy genres: horror, western, science fiction and fairy tales (with a book called Fairy Tales). They must have spend a lot of money, since they attracted the best artist, who did their best work from them. The quality of these books is such that it is a surprise that collectors have not given them a lot of attention over the years. That could be because the stories were not all that good (their war material was particulary safe and bland), but my guess is it has more to do with the fact that they did not do superheroes. Only the companes doing those attracted the kids that later would write about them, EC being a later exception because they were so extraordinary that they attracted readers and later scholars just for that reason.

The science fiction story that we discussed seems to have been drawn by Frank Giacoia in some sort of combination with others. I am not quite sure how many hands were involved. Although Giacoia later developed the reputation of being a bit lazy (or scared) and preferring to use friends to help him out with the pencilling, we must not forget that those same friend found him a very good artist in that earlier time. Carmine Infantino calls him the best of his generation and an inspiration to all. So if we find hints of other people's work in his material, it may have been that he influenced others instead of the other way around. All in all, I thought it would be a good thing to show some more of this early work of his.

In my collection I have a few Ziff-Davis comics, among them a sports book with some very pretty signed Giacioa work.So he did do work for them. So I went looking through some scans for more, but unfortunately most of the material in the books I came across was unsigned. What I did find was lots of very good material, not only bu Giacoia. Maybe due to the lack of interest in Zif-Davis, most of these books also haven't been written up properly at the GCD. The story lists are there sometimes, but there is almost no art identification other than what was signed or mentioned in interviews.

So here are two pretty stories fro G.I. Joe, that I think could have been done by Giacioa. I am open for different opinions. To that I have added one very pretty story by Bob Powell from G.I. Joe and one that is purported to have been drawn by Erwin Hasen and inked by Bernie Sach. Sachs has been called one of the most incompetent inkers he ever worked with by Gil Kane, but here he does a pretty good job (if it is him). I end with a typical collaboration by Dan Barry and Frank Giacoia from Weird Thriller. As far as I can seem that is not a Ziff-Davis title, but it could very well be.

Next week, I'll try and shame some of the other goodies in these Ziff-Davis books.