Greg Goldstein's Comic Art Gallery

Tag: Library of American Comics

Al Plastino — Batman’s Watery Doom!

Original Art and The Artists

Batman Daily Strip — July 8, 1969

Bat sheets. Bat soap. Bat pajamas. Bat-a-rangs…

As nearly any pop culture fan knows, (especially — ahem — older ones like myself) the hugely successful camp 1966 Batman TV show launched a plethora of bat merchandise.

So it’s no surprise that DC launched a revival of the Batman comic strip, which had a successful, but brief run in the Golden Age.

The daily strips initially mimicked the campiness of the TV show, but ultimately moved closer to more traditional DC superhero stories, as did the comics after the show was cancelled in early 1968.

Al Plastino handled the art chores for many of the strips, following Sheldon Moldoff and Joe Giella.

The strip managed to soldier on until early 1973. Finally managing to collect all of them — the dailies and Sundays — into a three-volume LOAC series was an archival highlight of mine at IDW. 

(It only took five years or so to convince DC to let us do it. Perseverance won the day.)

The original art for the third and final volume of the Silver Age Batman strip books is featured here.

Pete Poplaski — Superman’s Golden Age

Original Art and The Artists

Superman Retro Advertising Tin Sign, 1994

Nostalgic collectible tin advertising signs became all the rage in the 1990s.

At first, “reprints” of authentic signs started popping up at flea markets and street fairs. Many were classic brands and logos, some long defunct.

Shortly thereafter, inventive entrepreneurs created new signs designed to emulate the retro look and feel of the classics. You can still find many of these at shops and vendors that specialize in nostalgic candy, soda, etc.

Kitchen Sink, publisher at the time of the Superman and Batman newspaper strip reprint collections, issued two very cool Superman “advertising” tins designed and illustrated by the amazing Pete Poplaski. (This one is marked #3, but I’ve only seen two, so I’m assuming at least one design was tabled.)

As with nearly all of Pete’s illustrations, everything you see, including the lettering, is fully hand drawn. (The line detail on the buildings alone is astonishing.)

And no one captures classic comic art styles like Pete. (Well, maybe the equally amazing Paul Mavrides, but that’s a tale for another day.)

As mentioned previously, when we picked the DC strip reprint rights at IDW in 2013, Pete was our first choice to create all the cover material. 

And, as always, he knocked it out of the park.

Celebrating the 80th anniversary of the original Superman cartoons, created by the incredible Fleischer Studios for Paramount Pictures.
Paul Mavrides, Pete’s only real “competition” in recreating other artist styles, illustrated the Comic Book Confidential film poster art back in 1988, mimicking the art style of each individual artist. (Paul and the original art provide a funny intro to the film itself.)

Bob Montana — Instructional

Original Art and The Artists

Sunday June 13, 1954

Archie, as noted in the previous blog, rapidly achieved success. Within a few years after the character’s introduction, the Archie family added a hit newspaper strip to the successful comics line.  Bob Montana, Archie’s co-creator, worked on the strip for nearly 30 years until his untimely passing in 1975.

IDW and the Library of American Comics intended to publish a complete sequential series of these strips, but ran into a problem: Finding the actual strips themselves. Archie had no strip archive, and collectors, who had kept clipped strips from the era, concentrated primarily on adventure series and mostly ignored Archie.

Fortunately, we managed one book each of dailies and Sundays from the period, and even a cursory glance reveals Montana’s cleverness in cartooning.

Early solicitations for the Montana dailies book included this preliminary cover, but imprint Editor Dean Mullaney ultimately went in a different direction for publication.

Andrew Pepoy — Happy Birthday, Archie

Original Art and The Artists

Archie Americana Volume 1: Best of the 1940s HC, 2011

Archie Andrews, (along with many of the rest of his timeless Riverdale gang), celebrates his 80th anniversary this year.

Starting as a back-up feature in MLJ’s Pep Comics #22 (cover date December 1941), Archie and his pals gradually took over the whole comic, and eventually, in 1946, the entire company.

Archie’s creation is generally credited to MLJ founder John Goldwater, and cartoonist Bob Montana. Montana apparently based many of the characters on friends and neighbors from his high school days in Haverhill, Massachusetts.

IDW Publishing and Dark Horse both relentlessly chased Archie Comics for archival reprint rights — an area the company itself was slow to develop, and in 2009, Archie ultimately split those reprint rights between the two publishers.

AT IDW, we published hardcover “Best of” collections, based on both era and artist. We also added the Archie strips to our Library of American Comics imprint headed by Dean Mullaney. (More on that later.)

Andrew Pepoy drew era-specific covers for all four Archie’s Americana volumes. This cover from the first volume — Best of the 40s — is a faithful and clever re-working of Montana’s cover for Archie’s Pals and Gals #3. Ironically, Montana’s original is from the 50s (1954), but I don’t think anyone complained.

More Archie coming up in the next few posts as we celebrate his very youthful 80th. 

All four volumes in the IDW “Archie’s Americana” series feature era-specific covers by the talented Andrew Pepoy.
Starting as a back-up feature in MLJ’s Pep Comics #22 , Archie and his pals gradually took over the covers, the comic, and in 1946, the entire company.

Al Williamson — This Date in History

Original Art and The Artists

X-9: Secret Agent Corrigan Volume 5, 2013

Truly one of the most talented comic artists ever, the late Al Williamson spent 13 years illustrating Secret Agent Corrigan as a daily strip. (With writing by the late, also great, Archie Goodwin.) Here from 1977, is the 8/29 strip, with Corrigan dealing with one of those startling revelations that happened… well… quite regularly back in the day.

It matters not.  Archie was a terrific writer of course, but Al Williamson could have illustrated a guide to Windows XP, and I would have devoured it anyway.

I miss Al’s work. I also miss newspaper adventure strips, but that’s a lament for another day.

The complete five-volume collection of Williamson’s Corrigan (Also referred to as X-9) is one of my favorite series form the Library of American of Comics, and one of my favorite projects at IDW Publishing. Yes, that makes me biased. So?