Showing posts with label Lee Elias. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lee Elias. Show all posts

Friday, March 17, 2017

Yours, Madly

Friday Comic Book Day.

My book Behaving Madly is now safely at the printer's. It has over 160 pages of reprint material from the best of the mad imitators. Which means I was not able to include some terrific pieces. Here is the splash page for a ten page space parody by Le Elias for Lunatickle, which lost out to his ten page horror comics parody (also from Lunatickle). In the end the second one (written by Jack Mendelsohn) was more entertaining and more interesting as a satire. Both illustrate how much Lunatickle followed the model of the early Harvey Kurtzman Mad magazine.


By the way, the second story was very hard to clean up properly. It took me ten tries over a three month period, probably about a day a page. The first one looks all right, but is how I got stuck halfway through. At first I was able to produce pretty good clean-ups using a color mode which look fine on the internet, although the color is of course false and a byproduct of the cleaning process. But in the end, they would have been printed badly because the black inthere isn't black enough. Getting a good black and white version without loosing the details or (in some cases) the shading) was hard. Of course, we colored the paper a little bit, to keep a nostalgic old paper feel to the reprint instead of a harsh sharp black and white.

I intend to show of of the stories I did not use in the book in a seperate blog, but I don't want to hurry that because I do not wat to give people the impression they are going to be in the book and I also don't want to give away everything that is in the book. So we are waiting for the first sales figures to come in before starting the blog - or maybe I will give over this blog to that for a couple of months.

I hope you will give the book a chance. Have a look at the trailer Craig provided.


Sunday, March 12, 2017

Soft Spot

Friday Comic Book Day.

Eventhough I have become quite experienced at art spotting, there are always cases where it is difficult. Especially if you are dealing with artists who are so talented they can work in multiple styles. Here are three one pagers from Harvey romance titles, which stump me. There are traces of Lee Elias and I even see a hint of John Severin here and there. Some of my friends have suggested they might be the work of Warren Kremer, who was an artistic chameleon capable of anything. Although, on looking closer I think Howard Nostrand may have been involved as well (especially the last one of the three).


Some goes for this story, which looks like the work of Bernie Krigstein to me. And it's possible to, around the time this story was done, Krigstein did a story for on eof DC's war titles as well, so he was around. Still, it is not obviously his, as is the other story. It has been suggested the art is the work of Jerry Grandenetti instead. Another artistic chameleon, who very capably imitated Will Eisner on some of the later Dr. Drew stories and whose early DC work always looks like a cross between Joe Kubert and Carmine Infantino to me. What do you think?

Sunday, October 05, 2014

Full Frontal War

Friday Comic Book Day.

This week, I showed some advertising work by Lee Elias. As I sai, he is best known for his work on the science fiction Sunay strip Beyond Mars and the horror covers and stories he did for Harvey. At the same time, he alsowore on their war titles. In fact, in the first ten issues of Warfront he is in almost every issue in the regular line-up with Bob Powell, John Spranger and sometimes Rudy Palais.