THE HUNT FOR A CUBAN MASTER

 Wednesday Return.

Manhunt is an interesting magazine, because it used Matt Baker illustrations in it's first few years. But even after that the St. John published crime digest used comic book illustrators like Ric Estrada and Tony Talliarco. They all worked in the same scratchy house style, but luckily most of the art was signed.

I am particulary interested in the illustrations by Ric Estrada, who started out at EC in the fifties and ended up at DC in the sixties. Little is know about what he did in between, but doing my book Behaving Madly I did find that he drew about one third of the first two issues of Mad magazine imitator Frantic.

As I wrote myself on his wikipedia page: "After that he moved to Germany, where he stayed for three years. He did political cartoons for the Spandauer Volksblatt in the morning and did storyboards for the advertising company Deutsche Dokumentar- und Werbefilm GmbH in the afternoons." A trip to the Berlin Public Library (where volumes of the Spandauer Voksblatt are kept) didn't yield anything - because it took me a day to get registered and I didn't have time to stick around for the volumes to be brought down. But I will return and I will find these illustrations. The first time I saw his work in a crime digest was for the Alfred Hitchcock magazine, so I was not surprised to see him in Manhunt as well.

The Cuban Connection

Friday Comic Book Day.

I am still selling my comics on eBay. In the course of preparing those pages, I come across stuff I forgot I had. One of those is a find I did years ago, a story in Prize's Justice Traps the Guilty I believe to be by Ric Estrada. Estrada is a respected artis who today is mostly remembered for his work vaguely Tothlike at the DC war titles in the sixties. BUt he was around before that, even doing a story for Harvey Kurtzman at EC about Cuban fighters. In the late fifties he went to Germany for two years, as I recently found out because he was a Mormon and was doing his regular duty to go from door to door there. Before that very little of his career was known, until I found that he had drawn more than half of the two first issues of Mad magazine imitator Frantic. You will find some of those pages in my book Behaving Madly (linked on the right) and I will add one I didn't use to this post. Even then I knew about the Justice Traps the Guilty story, but I couldn't find it in any of my books anymore. So there I was scanning for a set of British JTTG reprints, when it turned up in black and white. I immediately made photos and for this blog I went to the Digital Comics Museum and got the proper scanned version in color as well, from Justice Traps the Guilty #77. It shows the slightly flowery style Estrada used in some of his other comic book work a couple of years before that (which you will find if you follow the Estrada link below).

As a sidenote, Mort Meskin lovers will see that some of the panels are fully redone, probably because of some comic code requesed rewrite. Maybe Estrada had already left for Germany and wasn't available. The Frantic pieces are unsigned, while most of Estrada's work for Frantic was, which is the mean reason I did not used this in the book. But it looks lovely, doesn't it?

Romancing the Song

Saturday Leftover Day.

I had four new Ric Estrada romance stories lying around.

Romancing The Genre

Saturday Leftover Day.

Here are a couple of more Ric Estrada pages, including the dingle story he did for DC before doing off to Germany and disappearig from comics for about ten years. In the comment section yesterday, Bob asked if Estrada worked in advertising. As far as I see he didn't. He was just a young kid coming frm the New York School of Visual arts. I don;t know if he was part of the same bunch of artist studying there under Jerry Robinson (which incudes Marie Severin, Bob Forgione, Ross Andru and Steve Ditko), some of which were consequently very much influenced by Alex Toth when they started working for Standard. But they all ended up at Standard and here Estada seems to be on his own and slightly later.

I have more of Estrada's earlier work and might ad that later. But for now, I am starting with the later stuff. Not all of it as impressive as the pages I shared yesterday, but if have one that is and will ad it as soon as possible