Mob Rules

 Sunday Surprise Day.

At the end of the last Century comic book artist and historian Dylan Williams set out to write the ultimate biogrpahy of Mort Meskin. He got sidetracked before to doing it, but he gave al of his note and intervoews to Steven Brower, who proceeded to do the difinitive work on the forgotten artist from the fifies as well as a very impressive story collection, both for Fantagraphics. Recently he transcibed Williams' interview with Meskin contemporary Marvin Stein, who wrked with him on various Prize titles and got him work at an advertising agency in the sixties, whoch very much eased the last decade of his career. You can read it here and I fully recommend it: http://www.tcj.com/long-time-coming-when-dylan-williams-interviewed-marvin-stein

In the accompanying piece it is confirmed that the late sixties newspaper strip McGurk's Mob really was drawn by the same Marvin Stein who drew all these crime books in the fifties and was long suspected to be one of Jack Kirby's earliest inkers at Marvel. The style of McGurk's Mob (a family strip about a family with  six kids or so) is visually completely different from the moody realistic work Stein did in the late fifties. Not really a very funny strip, or even remotely a hit, but certainly worth a look for Stein's place in comic history. I have shown some earlier whoch you'll find using the links underneath.

Marvin's Mob

Friday Obtuary Extra.

Several blogs and groups toay that comic book artist Marvin Stein has died at age 85. He was a contemporary of Jack Kirby, who worked with him and Joe Simon in the fifties. After Simon and Kirby left the crime titles Justice TRaps The Guilty and Headline, Stein seems to have continued them. At least he did most of the work for those titles and several others. In the late fifties, after inking some of Jack Kirby's work, he disappeared into advertising. He worked at BBD&O, where he got work for his friend and former co-worker at Prize Mort Meskin. Steven Brower had just interviewed him for his new book on Meskin and I was looking forward to reading that, as it was the first I had heard of Mr. Stein in a long time.

Anyway, in his obituary, it is mentioned that in the mid-fifties he did a family strip with Bud Wexler (who was a major force at Johnstone and Cushing, but almost never signed his work so I could have never gotten a handle on bis style. The strip is by-lined Bud Marvin and although I had seen it, I would never have guesed it was by Stein. I will ad some of his more familiar serious work from the fifties to this post later on, so you can all see the difference, but here at least are some rarely seen samles of his later funny style (which I never knew he had).