Earlier in the year, we celebrated EC Comics “New Trend” 50th anniversary with some great original art examples from the legendary Jack Davis. Today — and Saturday — we will celebrate once again, this time with the astonishing Wallace Wood.
Woody hadn’t quite hit his artistic prime yet when he drew this Weird Science tale, “The Probers.” But he was perhaps at his most prolific, pencilling and inking up to three pages a day(!) for EC and other publishers of the day.
That sheer volume would decrease as Woody’s detail became more and more intricate, and the finishes more and more polished. In a very short time, Wood’s peers would pretty much always refer to him as best in class.
Some of Woody’s great SF art (Non EC) can be found in his 50s comic book stories, as well as his illustrations for Galaxy magazine.
Joe Orlando brought his EC Comics horror sensibilities with him when he landed at DC in the late 60s.
Talk about being in the right place at the right time.
DC became a company where artists and visual storytellers (Carmine Infantino, Joe Kubert, Dick Giordano, et al) started moving into upper management and making editorial decisions.
“…Many times we were asked to do impossible things by writer/editors who had no sense of the visual-to do things that wouldn’t work and have to argue our way out of it. We just thought that as artists, we would do a better job working with talent.”
In just a few years, Joe turned around the moribund House of Mystery and the already-cancelled House of Secrets with tales of mystery, suspense and of course, horror. He and his team took advantage of the more-relaxed standards at the Comics Code, sometimes creating even more relaxed standards in the process.
(A few years later, Marvel would follow suit with a glut of horror titles that included vampires, werewolves and zombies. But, as always, we digress.)
And sure enough, Joe’s comics nearly instantly became artistic showcases for veterans like Gil Kane and Orlando’s EC mentor Wally Wood, along with young Turks like Bernie Wrightson, Nestor Redondo, and Mr. Kaluta here.
(Plus great covers often by Neal Adams. Definitely worth 12 or 15 cents.)
By 1972, Joe had built yet another house in the neighbored, and this great Kaluta page featuring both DC horror hosts, Cain and Abel, is the delightful intro to Secrets of Sinister House #6.
Classic.
An early Joe Orlando EC horror tale, and Joe’s caricature rendered by Marie Severin at the 1953 EC Christmas party.
Comic book pundits in 1986 decided the Shadow mini-series by Howard Chaykin was “controversial.”
Translation: Some fans liked it, some didn’t.
The late Harlan Ellison famously hated it. And Harlan was not famous for being gentle about his opinions. So there’s that. (Comic book journalists, critics, fans and trolls didn’t need the Internet in those days. They had fanzines. But I digress.)
Setting the series in the contemporary era seems to be a primary trigger for fans of the classic pulp character. Fans, who, it should be noted, mostly had abandoned their commercial interest in the character long ago.
A decade earlier, a series by Denny O’Neil and initially drawn Mike Kaluta, brilliantly faithful to The Shadow’s pulp origins and era, didn’t last past 12 issues.
So DC and Chaykin took a different approach with this series. And Chaykin’s world of The Shadow was definitely more “adult” (grittier, sexier, etc.) than earlier versions. Sign of the times, and Chaykin’s mature approach to comic book content specifically. (Chaykin’s Blackhawk and Black Kiss would follow shortly.)
For what it is worth, I gave it a shot, and liked it. The storytelling and art were — not surprisingly — top shelf. Did I care that the character was set in modern times?
I didn’t lose much sleep over it.
Controversial was an overly word then, and virtually worthless now. Dictionary definition is “giving rise or likely to give rise to public disagreement.”
So art is pretty much always “controversial.” Read some contemporaneous reviews of Citizen Kane or Star Wars. I’ll wait.
In 2020, of course, everything is controversial. I never thought I’d see the day when established facts were “controversial.”
I have a sweet spot for the Spectre, and I love the way he dominates this Alan Davis cover of this issue of the Justice Society. Despite the fact that I am an enthusiastic fan of Davis’ work, this is the first (and only) cover he drew that I own. I should rectify that one of these days.
As a young teen, I was the perfect age for the crazy, but brief, Bronze Age version of the character written by Michael Fleisher and wonderfully drawn by Jim Aparo, which featured woeful fates for the character’s antagonists. This version of Spectre arrives (early 1974) at nearly the exact same time as does another anti-hero, the Punisher, across town at Marvel comics.
Justice is served, indeed.
Comic book historian Les Daniels discussed the origin of this version of the character in DC Comics: Sixty Years of the World’s Favorite Comic Book Heroes:
“Joe Orlando was mugged and decided the world needed a really relentless super hero. The character came back with a vengeance … and quickly became a cause of controversy. Orlando plotted the stories with writer Michael Fleisher, and they emphasized the gruesome fates of criminals who ran afoul of the Spectre. The Comics Code had recently been liberalized, but this series pushed its restrictions to the limit, often by turning evildoers into inanimate objects and then thoroughly demolishing them. Jim Aparo’s art showed criminals being transformed into everything from broken glass to melting candles, but Fleisher was quick to point out that many of his most bizarre plot devices were lifted from stories published decades earlier.”
I had only recently discovered the classic EC Comics horror tiles, and these gruesome fates seemed to meld together the supernatural, horror and superhero tropes into one wonderful blended margarita of storytelling.
Definitely worth my 20 cents.
Fun fact: 1974 is indeed the year of the anti-hero. Wolverine appears for the first time a few months later. It took a while, but in 1982, a catchphrase summed up his personality. “I’m the best there is at what I do, but what I do best isn’t very nice.” Snikt!
The Spectre appears… and reappears. First appearances, Golden Age, Silver Age and Bronze Age.
Witching Hour #5, November 1969, “The Sole Survivor”
Today we launch a two-week series celebrating Halloween with the best in monsters, mystery and mayhem.
It’s difficult to attend Baltimore Comic Con without thinking about Bernie Wrightson, who hailed from here, and made his final convention appearance here six months prior to his death in 2017.
Wrightson’s professional comics career began in DC’s mystery anthology titles just six months before this art was published, 50 years ago this month.
This page, therefore, is very early Wrightson, and although it’s still a few years away from his artistic peak, the talent, and signature detail, is already unmistakably there. His art hooked me early on, and I remain hooked.
Those DC mystery and horror comics, many edited by EC legend Joe Orlando, often showcased star artists like Wrightson, Mike Kaluta, Neal Adams, Gil Kane, and others, including occasionally Orlando himself.
Of course, like other anthology comics, you never knew what the line-up was going to be from title to title, issue to issue. These series were indeed like Forrest Gump’s proverbial box of chocolates: You never know what you’re going to get.
So of course they were always the titles I tried to skim through urgently on the candy store spinner racks, before that crusty proprietor Mr. Wurman would inevitably glance my way and say: “You gonna buy those? This is not a library.”
Bernie painted this beautiful cover for the short-lived Web of Horror magazine in the same timeframe as his early DC work — He was 21 years old.
