If It Quacks Like A Duck...

Since I am selling my comic book collection on eBay, I keep running into interesting stuff while I am photographing them for sale. In Youn Love #18 there is a story by n artist I did not immediately recognize. But still it looked quite familiar. For me art spotting is easy. If something looks like it is possibly drawn by someone, it probably isn't. Most styles are so indicidual that you can pick them out easily. So any sort of doubt is in fact a disqualifier. But still... this story looked familiar and I looked and looked and sudenly I saw who it reminded me of. Steve Ditko. This gives me another problem. Officiall Ditko was not working until 1953, but my friend Michael T. Gilbert has recently discovered some Ditko work (what he calls his 'first') on someone elses pages in 1950. And most people agree, so it might be so. Ditko was already following night classes in 1950, so having him assist on a job as some sort of work experience is not out of the question. But... Steve Ditko is one of the most often mentioned artists when people start in the wild. Apparently, in his early yera he took on so many influences from so many artists (most notably Will Eisner, Mort Meskin and Joe Kubert) sometimes the work of those old masters (or others influenced by them, like Bob Forgione, who followed night classes alongside Ditko) looks 'like Ditko'. And thirdly, Jim Vadeboncoeur Jr. one of the best art spotters in the world, has stated that the at is in fact done by Frank Bolle. Now Frank Bolle was something of an artistic sponge, so he could do anything. In the early fifties (this story is from 1951, by the way) he was most often working alongside Leonard Starr, who a. did a lot of work for the Prize romance books (like Young Love) and b. traces of whose work can be seen here as well. So my on the job training tells me that this is probably not by Ditko. But let me tell you which parts remind me of him anyway.

On the splash page the guy kissing the girl looks like something Frank Bolle could draw.The inking of his face is very Ditko-ish. The last two panels have that Milt Caniff light feel, that most of the work of Bolle's frequent collaborator Leonard Starr used to have.

In the second page more of the Caniff light touch, but the face and posture of the guy in the last panel is lake that of some villian spotting Spiderman.

On the third pagemuch reminds me of Ditko. The face of the guy in the frst three panels, the looks of the characters in the past panel...

Page four. No specific Ditko touches. Just a sort of stiffness that suggests we are not dealing with a routinous artist, which could be a sign of many artists.

On page five, what stands out most is the punch in the last panel. If that is not a swipe of a Jack Kirby panel, it probably is by Kirby himself.

Page six.More Ditko, more Caniff light and even a bit more Kirby (the guy in the first panel).

Page seven.Panel four reminds me of Ditko again.

Page eight. The ending of this story is the most Ditko-like of them all, with the guy giving some last advice in the last panel that could be straight out of Spiderman or Mr. A.

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?

Justice Will Bite You

Sunday Meskin Measures.

A couple of weeks ago I was selling the first half of my Prize crime comics on eBay and I showed the photos I made of the Mort Meskin splash pages (and two of the whole stories) here. Since then, most of them have been bought and I am ready to sell the second half. So again, here are the photos I took to go along with that. Again, these books contain some Meskin stories I was not able to show here, so I hope I am making amends by sharing the photos. This lot contains all of my 1953/55 book, which have the best work Meskin ever did for Prize. Maybe he was spurred on by his efforts to get hired by DC, but shaking off the heavy inking methods of George Roussos, he developed a new slick style that suits these stoies quite well. His characters all look like true criminals, as you can see for yourself below. I even found a couple of the earliest issues, including one with the first Meskin/Robinson sory for this title. At the end you see two stories by George Roussos, who had taken Meskin's cue and lightened his own style as well.

My name on eBay is geapelde and I hope you will have a look.