Connections: Frank Frazetta and Steve Ditko

Lioness Watching Cabin is included in Frank Frazetta: Book Three (New York: Bantam Books, 1979), but no date is given. Ditko’s story “The Teddy Bear” was published in Amazing Adventures, vol. 1, no. 3, in August 1961. The panel by Frazetta that features “Krag, the sabretooth tiger” is from the second page of the story “When the Earth Shook,” which appeared in Thun’da #1 in 1952.

UPDATE:

With the help of a reader, Clayton, I now have a rough date for “Lioness Watching Cabin,” which, it turns out, is one of the few completed illustrations from a re-do of a Wally Wood illustrated story, “Came the Dawn,” written by Al Feldstein, that Frazetta worked on, but didn’t finish, for the unpublished Shock Illustrated #4, which, had it been published, would have appeared in 1956. Frazetta’s artwork was featured early last year on Mr. Door Tree’s Golden Age Comic Book Stories blog, which I regularly visit and highly recommend to anyone who might be reading this message. Here’s the link to Mr. Door Tree’s post that includes Wally Wood’s original illumination of Feldstein’s script along with Frazetta’s abandoned re-vision.

All of which means we can now say with some certainty that Frazetta’s “Lioness Watching Cabin” illustration was produced before the mountain lion watching tent comic panel by Ditko.