A Little Argument

Friday Comic Book Day.

Here has been a discussion going on on Facebook between two publishers of old comics. Both of them use material from the copyright free domain to make collections. One of them only chooses the best, presents the material in the best possible way and has the most prestigious scholars comment on them. The other one has no problem showing unpopular artists, shows the material as it was and stresses the outragousness of many of the stories he is reprinting. Can you guess who I am with? Yes, it's the second one. Not only because the first one (Fantagraphics started the attack - and it really was a hatched job) and the second one (Craig Yoe) has never counterattacked, and even published a list of the best Fantagraphics book he knew. Not even because I have worked with Craig on Behaving Madly and can never get a Fantagraphic's attention. The real reason is that I find collecting comics from the fifties both a joy and silly. There was a lot of crap made in that period (as in any period) and I have been running my blog to celebrate that. I do not believe in dividing the comics world into the worthy and the not worthy. As I have proven here time and again there is good and bad to be found in most artists. There is excellence in some artist who just hacked away at it and there are some who worked really hard and still didn't manage to find their groove. I don't believe in publishing only the established big names, reprinting the EC books for the umpteenth time and adding scholarly commentary that only rehashes what we already know to justify the importance of my hobby.

Lately I have been looking at a couple of Stan Lee produced Timely/Atlas books from the early fifties and like the first time I became interested in them I was blown away completely again. Only two books, Adventures into Weird Worlds #13 and #21, two issues I had not seen before. And I know, there is very little in there that reaches the level of excellence that the EC books do. But they are also imbued with a sense of fun that Al Feldstein and his creators only rarely reached. Over the next few days I hope to show some of those stories and maybe add a little nonscholarly commentary by myself.

Adventures into Weird Worlds was one of the many horror titles that were launched in the early fifties to cash in on the current rage for that sort of material. What happened in comics was that the soldiers that read the comics in the forties were looking for the next step up and the rougher, more adult material provided that (in the horror books, but also in the new, grimmer war titles). The first story is a story with a twist, like the ones Stan Lee liked to write himself. In fact, there are a couple more indications it might have been one of his. There is the use of 'thru' instead of 'through', which he always did (even in his private correspondence with syndicates). There is the use of four dialogueless panels in a row with commentary on top (which he may have gotten from Harvey Kurtzman at EC). There is the fact that the story concerns classical monsters, which Stan always liked and used and reused an many ways, the fact that it has a twist ending - many of Stan's stories start out a a 'joke'. And it has seven pages, which is one page more than normal - a bonus he only afforded himself over all the other writers. There are indications it may not be his as well. First of all, Stan used to write in bunches on his day off or at the weekend. That means that all of his stories fall into a set of sequential job numbers - most of them ending or starting with one of his funny teen books (My Friend Irma and such) which he had to do one a week anyway. The added horror or war story usually was a little something extra, maybe because something occurred to him while writing the other assignments. Sadly, the job numbers surrounding this one (B-346) are not signed by Stan and are not likely to have been written by him either. So I is more likely to have been brought in by another writer. And lastly he did not sign this story, where he did sign most of his work. On the plus side, this story is drawn by Carmine Infantino, one of the top talents he liked to use for his own stories.

Carmine Infantino did not sign his work either, but there was only one artist doing this sort of detailed and often grotesque work at Timely and that was Infantino. If you go to the Atlas Tales website and look up this book, you will see a bunch of us agreed on that attribution, at least. As for the Stan Lee attribution... I don't think it is his. Another complication is the fact that the monster introduced in this story was used again in Adventures into Weird Worlds #15, is another unsigned story drawn by George Tuska. And again, there are no Stan Lee written stories surrounding that job number (B-781). It also has 'thru', it has the row of textless panels, seven pages and a twist ending. But two unsigned ones as a solo effort? Very unlikely.

In that case, there is only one other writer who shares some of these characteristics with Stan, and that is Hank Chapman. Only problem is that he too usually signed his work and that he had left the horror field (famously, because they gave him nightmares) and had started writing war stories for Stan - and lots of them.

So here is the first one. I will do the second one tomorrow. Presented as is, and none of them will convince the art world that comics from the fifties were a noble endeavour. But for those of us who love reading, they are very well produced, they do not have the text heavy style that pulled down the EC books and both George Tuska and Carmine Infantino are two of the greats of the industry whose work in the fifties is unjustly forgotten. They also present another view of what was happening in comics in the fifties than the black and white EC versus the rest of the world view presents. I will go into that in one of my next posts about these fascinating books.

War Instruction

Friday Comic Book Day.

One of the fist pieces I wrote about Hank Chapman, was an extensive set of notes to the story The Assault from Men in Action #6 (September 1952), used on the Atlas Tales website. It was drawn by Mac Pakula, all except page 5 which for some reason was a collage (possibly added after the story was done) of a tank assault, using images from various other artists and probably from other stories. At the time I wrote these comments, I was not yet aware of the work of Hank Chapman in 1951 and 1952, which I have written about later to a larger extent. If you follow the link you will find those writings. This story is not included there, because it is not signed by Chapman. But the language, the use of sound effects and the documentary style make it probably his. I came across these notes when I prepared my copy f this book to be sold on EBay (which will go up this weekend).

This is what I wrote back then:

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Assault, is a propaganda piece aimed at the humble foot soldier (many of whom were reading these books). Pvt. William Manning is a scary guy. He and his fellow soldiers of the second regiment are scattered over the terrain at Dwakai in October 1951. Pvt. Manning is afraid they will all die, because it's only 300 of them against thousands of reds. His friends tell him to leave the brain work to the big brass, but when he hears they are going to attack at 1200 hours, he is sure they'll die. The narrator takes over and addresses him directly, a trick often used in these books, mostly by Hank Chapman, whose work this surely resembles. "But that is only part of the picture... the part that you're involved in! There are more parts in this giant jig-saw called assault!" He goes on to explain that the 300 men are backed-up by guns, howitzers, tanks, planes and other hardware firing over their heads at the reds. When the assault finally happens (in a full page splash on page 5), the army wins. And to assure the lowly foot soldiers reading this, the story ends with a army bigwig saying: "With all we've got, the most important element of assault is still the foot soldier! Bless everyone of the mud-slogging, foxhole-digging sons of battle!" Several things make this story stand out production-wise. First of all, on the opening page, above the title, as quick introduction has been added - in such a way that is partly runs over the title block: "A soldier's mind can be a hodgepodge of doubts, bravery, fear and uncertainty! Here's a close look into such a mind and the story of what happened to it in the face of... assault!" Did someone object to the story? If so, maybe other parts of the story were rewritten as well. There's no evidence of any of that. And then there is the assault splash on page 5. There are several signs that that page has been doctored with and it might even have been assembled after the story was finished. One would think that such a page was the whole point of the story - to show the different parts that make up an assault in one huge page - but in fact the story reads just as well without it, so it could have been a later addition. The splash itself has an uneasy mix of perspectives, that could indicate that is was cobbled together from something else. On the top half there are two down-looking shots of a row of jeeps driving though a camp and several tanks coming over the ridge of a mountain. We would have to assume that the mountains we are looking at are sloping very much, to accommodate such a shot. Under that is a single group of soldiers running over another ridge. They are looking sideways and it is not quite clear what they are doing. Then there is a group of soldiers running towards the camera, charging a couple of red soldiers. In the back is an explosion. These are the only reds on the whole page and frankly, the positioning of the groups makes you wonder what they are doing so far behind the enemy lines. Underneath them is a group of soldiers shooting a totally different way. This is a downward shot that fits very badly with upshot of the charging soldiers above them. And in front of that is a purple colored close-up of a soldier firing in yet another direction. This is a pasted in image drawn by Joe Maneely. I knew I'd seen it somewhere, so I searched Atlas Tales for Maneely samples and found it soon enough... it's the shooting soldier from Battlefront #2, published a couple of months earlier. Oh and there are five almost identical planes added to the sky, flying from the left to the right, further mystifying as to where the action really is. Other signs that this page has been doctored with are the slight (or sometimes not so slight) lines that suggest some cutting and pasting has been performed... two vertical lines, one through one of the tents in the camp and one next to the group charging the reds... the second one has a different type of crosshatching to the left than to the right. There's also a line visible on the bottom of the page underneath the past-up of Maneely's cover image and a very slight line to the right of the group running over the ridge. So what does it all mean? I don't think the page was especially assembled, because it would have been better if it was done as a whole. Still, it could be. I am not even sure if the images used are all by the same artist. The charging group in the middle could be by Russ Heath, making the whole clip and mix theory more likely. Or could it be a reassembly of an earlier version of the page, maybe some sort of action page? 

The same book has another Hank Chapman story (illustrated by George Tuska) that is signed.

War For Sale

Friday Comic Book Day.

This week I have started selling my Atlas war books on Ebay. The first series to go is War Comics, which will include many of the stories mentioned here when I did the Hank Chapman series this summer. The first lot will be up by Sunday and will include two of the three Russ Heath stories with consecutive job numbers I showed a fe weeks ago. It also has one issue that has two of the nineteen job numvers that were issues after #9999, when Stan Lee decided to change to a letter plus number system and found out he had ordered but not numbered nineteen stories (which then became #10001 to 10019). Three of those are in War Comics #10 two illustrated stories and atext story).

From 1945, all stories produced for Timely/Atlas were identified by a job number. They were given out when the script was bought and probaby used as an accounting tool - to track the progress of a story, assign it to a book and see who would get paid for it. Late in 1951, the four number system ran out and Martin Goodman and/or his editor Stan Lee decided to start again with a one letter-four number system, with the first story to be assigned a number that way numbered A-1, the next one A-2, etc. But as with any system, there were a few holes to plug. Some stories that had already been given to artists but had vailed to get a job number came in late and for some reason it was decided not to give them a new numer, but to make an exception and give them a five figure number. Or at least, that is one way to explain why there were nineteen stories numbered 10001 to 10019. Another could be that the idea to start a new system was invented only after juggling the zeroes was found to difficult. The 'nineteen' that got away' were not in any particular genre and fom a nice cross section of all of Timey's output. The stories appeared in books in early 1952. This is one of those books, which doesn't only have job number #1004 but also the first 'new' one, A-1. Most of these stories have been 'found'. The only ones missing are 10001 and 10002.

War Is Hell (But Necessary) Addendum

Some New Insights

I see the postings as a work in progress. Since I do them daily, I feel free to write what I know and come back to a subject if I find something new. Looking into a war series I had not yet combed through I found two more early Hank CHapman war stories of a totally different nature than the negative stories I have highlighted here. I knew he wrote straightforward 'go and kill the bastards' stories from late 1952, when the tide seems to have turned in Korea. And certainly his war stories for DC later in the decade were not as peesimistic as the ones I have shown here. But still, I assumed an inner need to write these stories, a struglle with the essence of war itself. These two realy stories from Combat Kelly seem to disprove that. Combat Kelly (and Combat Casey after it) were two titles Chapman wrote from 1953 and they were filled with unnuanced (and often jingoistic) Gung Ho stories. Not realizing Combat Kelly had started as early as late 1951, I looked and found two early Chapman stories in #3, written right in the middle of his most negative period at the other titles. It is drawn by Joe Maneely and it is intreesting to see Chapman used many of his documentary techniques here as well. I do not know where to place them in his oeuvre, but that is no reason not to share them.

War Is Hell (But Necessary) Extra

Saturday Leftover Day.

I am glad to see my Hank Chapman posts garnered so many positive responses. I hope I have played a smal part in bringing this unknown creator to the light. Of course Chapman was not functioning in a vacuum. At the same time he was doing his pessimistic war sories, other writers were struggling with a losing and possibly unwinnable war as well. Although none so graphicly or so well told. Apart for a couple of samples, which I am showing today.

The first is a story that could have been written by Chapman himself, except for the fact that he signed all his work. The story itself shows no signs of having been written by him either, except for the brutal ending. The second story is a typical bit of Stan Lee sentimentality, but the basic idea is just as bleak as Chapman's stories and together with Joe maneely, Lee creates a nice little package.

War Is Hell (But Necessary) 20

Chapter 20

This all culminated in what many considered Chapman's best (and most negative) masterpiece.  It appeared in Battlefield #2 and was drawn by Jewish artist Paul Reinman.I accidentally showed this last saturday as well, but here it is with commentary. On the Saturday I have posted another Chapman story from the period before this one.

Using all the tricks in his book, Chapman examines the cruelty of the communists in the Korean war.

He compares them to other cruelties, in other wars, such as (most famously) the plight of the jews in the concentration camps.

He uses headlines all the way through, but cleverly asks the question if we should believe them at the end of the story. If we should, what would be the answer to these new atrocities? Should it be the same way we ended the Second World War, by throwing an atamic bomb on the enemy?

I believe this story goes to the heart of what drove Hank Chapman as a writer. He was not a liberal, he had lived through a war and knew how necessary it could be. But he also knew how terrible it could be and by showing that he may have made the most anti-war and off-putting comics of his time.

I am still looking for evidence that the army banned these books, because I can't believe any army would want their soldiers to read them. In the end his logical approach leads him to a conclusion even he thought was horrific. I don't know if throwing a boms was commonly discussed in newspapers at that time (I certainly haven't found any proof of that), but suggesting it in a comic book story takes an author who is either very talented or very driven. Most probably, Hank Chapman was both.