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SEE ALSO: Look Here: Five LOVE PROBLEMS with art by Lee Elias
"This day's experience, set in order, none of it left ragged or lying about, all of it gathered in like treasure and finished with, set aside." –Alice Munro, "What is Remembered"
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The element that distinguishes Lee Elias’s work here from your run-of-the-mill, damsel-in-distress comic-book cover is the half-naked guy on the ground grasping helplessly at the leg of the evil doer. More typically in fantasy art, it’s the girl who is on the ground, hanging onto the leg of the man, who is cast in the role of heroic protector. Elias’s canny subversion of that tired cliché reveals an artist who has not simply gone through the motions on a routine cover assignment but has thought his way through to a creative solution that gives the obligatory horror and cheesecake a playful tweak on the nose.
From First Love Illustrated #44 (September 1954), here’s “The Right to Love,” with uncredited story art that “this checklist” on the Kirby Museum site attributes to Bill Draut, whose style here is economical and attractive; the Caniff-influenced cover art, which looks to me to have the hero kissing a totally different woman that the one in the story, is by Lee Elias, who wisely signed his work, thereby ensuring that he would get credit for his contribution, in print, at the time the comic was published:
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Anyone know if Darwyn Cooke has ever acknowledged Bill Draut’s work as an influence?