Alden McWilliams in Spaaaaaaaace!

Corbett in (Four) Colors
Ger Apeldoorn has been doing us the favor of reprinting stories from Mort Meskin's Tom Corbett: Space Cadet comic books. As he mentioned, Dell published its own series of Tom Corbett books, beginning with three issues in its Four Color series (#s 378,400. and 421), then continuing as a quarterly series series for eight more issues.

The regular series is usually dismissed because the stories were dull and the artwork weak. Both charges are largely correct. They were drawn in one of those competent but deadly dull leftover- Golden-Age styles. Unlike the Four Color issues, the series stories quickly dumped the show's Outer Space trappings. The cadets' spaceship was just a convenient way to travel to a distant planet. Once there they acted out a generic fantasy adventure that could as easily have starred Tarzan or Turok. In at least one issue they didn't even make it back to the ship before the mandatory closing joke.

However they did have great cover paintings! Here's the one from issue four.

The Four Color issues were another matter. They were drawn by Alden McWilliams, legendary Raymond-school illustrator who drew thousands of pages of comic books and strips, ghosted for everyone in the universe, painted for galleries, yet never managed to be listed among the "big guys" by comics fans.

Alone among 1950s space comic artists, McWilliams played up the lack of up and down in space. His spacemen stand upside down or sideways on the hulls of their ships, casting long shadows suggesting the high-contrast lighting writers used to tell us we'd find beyond Earth's atmosphere. His interiors were less imaginative: the engine room looks like that of an earthside steamship. But that wasn't unusual; pulp magazines had only just died out, and their pipe-and-bolt science-fiction tradition was still strong.

The stories were by Paul S. Newman, that incredibly prolific writer of increasingly-bland comics stories. His Corbett stories weren't that bad, and they exploited common kids' s-f themes: space pirates, space colonists, and space battles. They were certainly more space-specific than the series stories. They were extra-long, like many Dells of the period. The story filled not only the 32 interior pages but also the inside (in b&w) and outside back covers. I hated that as a kid. If a friend traded you a coverless copy you never got to see how the story ended!

Here are some sample pages from issue 400. I found them thanks to a comment from "tom" on Ger's blog. They came from the wide-ranging collection at Comicsworld (comicsworld.wordpress.com) which has a wonderful collection of Four Colors. (Unfortunately they're hosted on one of those download sites that try to force you into paying for "premium" service by limiting your slow downloads to one every 15 minutes.)

The deep perspective in the last panel of the first page (page 10) really gives an impression of weightlessness and the great distances in space. It also suggests an interesting gimmick that McWilliams develops more thoroughly on a later page (page 15, seen below). He apparently figured space cannon would be heat rays. Instead of twisted ragged metal, the outcome of the ray blast above was oozing blobs of molten metal. It's a neat effect, if a bit odd. Too bad the exhaust nozzles look like holes drilled in a piece of wood.

The third sample page (page 26) shows some nice characters amongst the pirate gang, including a couple of beautiful women. Even in a squeaky-clean Dell comic, Al managed to get in some sexy babes.

If you're interested in seeing the entire book, I suggest you visit Comicsworld. 36 pages are a bit more than I want to post right now.

One nice thing about comics based on TV shows and movies was that unlike their inspirations, the comics had no limitations to the "budget" for sets and special effects. Sadly only a few Dell artists took advantage of this--Alden McWilliams, George Evans and Reed Crandall, and Alberto Giolitti come to mind. Most Dell illustrators tended to cheat on backgrounds and favored pedestrian compositions. Nonetheless I love these comics. I grew up on Dell movie and TV comics the way other kids grew up on EC or the silver age DC superheroes. You'll see them pop up here from time to time.

Ray Bailey's Undersea Agent

Under da Sea wit' U.N.D.E.R.S.E.A.
In one of my Tom Corbett posts I promised (threatened?) to dig out my Ray Bailey Undersea Agent original. Here it is!

It's page 10 from the first issue of Tower Comics' second adventure magazine (the first being the superhero book T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, of course). The Comics Code stamp on the back is from 1965. The page is enormous, roughly 13x21 inches, on heavy Strathmore vellum-finish bristol.

I love this page, despite the unfortunate racial caricature of Dr. Fang. It's Bailey at his best: superb balance of black and white, lots of attention to detail, crisp inking, and the unbeatable Bailey Rocks. The ink is thick and intensely black, the way the old Pelikan yellow-label used to be. I was surprised that Bailey used a pen much more than I'd thought. Most of the outlining on heads, bodies, and hands (even the big closeup thumbs in panel 1) are flexible steel penwork. So is the lighter hair and beards; even some of the folds on the diving suit in panel 2 appear to be pen rather than brush.

At the top is a note Ray wrote to his editor Samm Schwartz, translating the Chinese characters. The partly-cut-off note near the second panel is the word "coral," probably intended for the colorist. The caption in the final panel is a pasteover. Using a light table I discovered the text it covers is the same, but the letterer had used a slightly larger lettering size than he used on the rest of the page. Hence the extra space between lettering and panel border at the bottom of the caption. By the way, if anyone knows who this letterer is, please let me know. His lettering has a "newspaper comic strip" rather than a "comic book" style, and he's easily recognizable by his unique exclamation marks.

The hero of this strip is one Davy Jones (now there's an original name!), who resembles Pat Ryan right down to his pipe smoking. At first he was a mortal man, but in the second issue he gained a lame super-power: the ability to attract or repel things, without even having to say "Volto!" The fellow who looks like Santa Claus is his boss Professor Weston, who built an undersea lab on the site of the ruins of Atlantis. Believe it or not, "Undersea" is actually an acronym. You thought T.H.U.N.D.E.R. (The Higher United Nations Defense Enforcement Reserves) was bad? How about "United Nations Department of Experiment and Research Systems Established at Atlantis"?

Undersea Agent was a 64-page comic with several characters. Bailey drew most of the Davy Jones stories, though in my opinion the first was his best. The book only lasted six issues.
When I bought the second issue back in 1966, something about Bailey's work looked "wrong" to this high-school art fan. It wasn't until last year that I learned Bailey had been inked by, of all people, Sheldon Moldoff! It's the only time I know that Bailey was inked by someone else. Moldoff did a pretty good job. Bailey must have been a very tight penciler for Shelly to come so close to his look. I wonder how this teamup came about, and why Moldoff never seems to have done any other work for Tower. At right is a sample page taken from the Who's Who website, where it's credited to Bailey alone. However Moldoff's Who's Who listing does list his Undersea Agent credit.

Tom Corbett in Color (2)

Space Jokes for Space Jocks
Here are three more of my Tom Corbett, Space Cadet Sundays. All precede the examples in my last post. The first, from 15 February 1953, begins a story documenting Tom's adventures as chairman of the Prom Committee. Now there's action! Wait a minute--check out whom Tom will be escorting to the Prom. None other than The Dragon Lady, striking one of her most famous poses (minus the gun)! Maybe there will be some action beyond Tom losing his wallet down a very 20th-century drain.

Space Dust was Bailey's answer to the "drop panel" dilemma. Since many papers by this time ran Sundays in one-third page size, the art had to be prepared so a row of panels could be omitted without confusing the story. Some creators padded the first row with irrelevant story material. The episode began in earnest in the second row. Others, like Bailey, filled most of the space with a "side feature" that wouldn't be missed. In the strip above, more cutting still had to be done to save the final "pay-off" panel. My guess is they'd cut panel 3. They might also trim panel 1 to half-size and lose the logo.

Man, I love the way Bailey draws mountains!

As the next page shows, in 1951 the Sundays were one-shot "jokes" rather than continuities. I put "jokes" in quotes because I find them really lame. Take this one from Sunday, 11 November 1951:

I notice the space station dispatchers are all sexy women. Wonder if any of them bought purple wigs and went to work for S.H.A.D.O.'s Moon Base.

My last offering comes from 20 January 1952. It's another joke strip. Nice pose and black/white balance in panel 5. Bailey used the baseball-cap-and-green-sunglasses outfit from panel 1 many times in later years, notably his comic book adaptations of Steve Canyon and the TV show Whirlybirds. In the drop section, Space Dust tackles global warming half a century early!

Tom Corbett in Color

Ray Bailey, Space Cadet
Today I offer four of the handful of Tom Corbett, Space Cadet Sundays I found in a thrift shop. They come from the San Francisco Chronicle. Three seem to be from the same story. All show off Ray Bailey's great artwork.First comes the 20 April 1952 episode, featuring Ray's take on the Dragon Lady. "Sultra" even sports Madame DL's cape, not to mention the official Sophisticated Bad Babe Cigarette Holder. Note that while everyone else comes from Caniff Land, the fellow in green leaning on Venger's seat definitely hails from Mongo. Was Bailey just having some fun?In the next strip, from 28 June 1953, The Polaris crew have entered a space race. Almost everyone smokes in Tom Corbett except the cadets themselves, and as we see here the top brass is partial to stogies. This seems more like Civil War generals than futuristic Academy faculty members. Come to think of it, the officers even look like Civil War generals, sporting moustaches and full beards which weren't common in 1953's U.S. military.We learn in the 12 July 1953 Sunday that Roger believes the ship has visited an alternate earth. Tom and Astro figure he's space crazy. They may be right, considering that Roger is glassy-eyed and he wanders off in search of the "one person" who will believe him.My final offering is from 26 July 1953. From the reference to "Manning and his charts" I think this is from the same storyline, and that Lorelei in panel 3 is the "only one" Roger was looking for. Sydney Greenstreet makes a guest appearance in the first panel, smoking one of Commander Arkwright's cigars and enjoying a great rendering job. Meanwhile, in panel 4 we see some of those great Ray Bailey mountains. Then there's Lorelei herself, a classic Caniff Girl if ever there was one.
If from the above you gather I'm a Bailey fan, give yourself a 25th-century cigar. I plan to run some more Corbett Sundays next time (I have maybe eight more), and when I can scan it, I'll post my beloved Undersea Agent original which proves that Bailey still had that spark in the late 60s.