Here are three more covers with art by Richard Powers, scanned (as usual) by me from paperbacks in my personal collection:
Category: Look Here
Look Here: Ellery Queen shadowbox covers, post 3 of 3
What follows is the final group of four paperbacks from the Signet series of Ellery Queen novels that I have in my personal library:
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The novels were published in the early 1970s by The New American Library of Canada Limited, Toronto, Ontario. The scans are my own.
NAVIGATION:
Look Here: Ellery Queen shadowbox covers, post 2 of 3
Here, as promised, is the second of three posts devoted to the Signet series of Ellery Queen mystery novels that appeared in the early 1970s. I have twelve of the novels in the series in my collection. I posted my scans of the first four yesterday. And I’ll post the final four tomorrow.
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The oversized props really do lift the concept for those covers to a whole new level of wacky.
NAVIGATION:
Look Here: Ellery Queen shadowbox covers, post 1 of 3
I have twelve of the paperbacks in the Signet reprint series of Ellery Queen mystery novels that appeared in the early 1970s, published by The New American Library of Canada Limited, Toronto, Ontario. What attracted me to the series was the puzzling low-budget editorial decision to tie the books together visually with cover photographs — the photographer is uncredited — of individual women in various costumes (and various stages of undress), holding various symbolic props, mostly oversized, and standing in what I would describe as multicoloured shadowboxes. Unfortunately, I don’t have all of the books that appeared in the series, but since I really don’t have any intention of hunting the rest of them down to complete my collection, I’ve decided to go ahead and scan the covers of the books that I do have. So here, for your viewing enjoyment, is the first group of four, presented in order of publication, with eight more covers to follow, also presented in groups of four, so stay tuned for that:
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NAVIGATION:
Look Here, Read: “Frankie Garson the Bookie King”
From Crime and Punishment #70 (December 1954), here’s “Frankie Garson the Bookie King”; the artist is uncredited, and the Grand Comics Database is no help in this instance, but judging by the odd landscapes, the distinctive character types, the loose but economical inking, and the thoughtful panel compositions, I’m fairly confident that the artist is our old friend Louis Zansky, whose work in comics has, for the most part, fallen into the public domain and is thus ripe for collection by some enterprising publisher with shallow pockets and questionable taste:
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To view all of the stories (in the public domain) with art by Louis Zansky that have appeared on RCN since January of this year, click here.
And, all joking aside, I wouldn’t have posted all of those stories if I didn’t think highly of Zansky’s work in comics. It’s just a pity that he dropped out of the business before he had a chance to work with some better scripts.
Look Here: Lashings of the old ultra-violence
More scans from my personal library of future landfill:
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Look Here: Five for a dollar
A local seller of used books currently has a sale shelf where everything on display is five for a dollar. Here are the books I selected (where I know the cover artist/photographer, the info is in the file name):
A couple of the books have a bit of damage, but as a Malzberg collector, I’d have paid five or six bucks for The Spread alone, and as an collector of paperbacks with interesting cover art, I’d definitely have paid a buck or two for Roger LaManna’s Black Hit Woman. Also, although I don’t usually buy covers with photos on the front, I made an exception in the case of To the Beat of Drum based on a sudden idiosyncratic insight (or delusion) that Dennis Rolfe’s composition is some sort of visual kissing cousin to the famous double portrait of Rene Magritte and his wife Georgette, The Shadow and Its Shadow (1932):
Not to mention Pierre Bonnard’s Nude in an Interior (1912-14):
Needless to say, I left the bookstore that day with a spring in my step — although I must admit, the short stack of SF paperbacks with cover art by Richard Powers that I purchased at the same time might also have contributed to my good mood.
BONUS SCAN:
The list of “Kozy Books” on the back cover of Water Witch is amusing, I think:
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Cozy up with Kozy Books!
Look Here: Four more Keith Laumer SF paperbacks with cover art by Richard Powers
Freshly scanned, by me, from my very own library:
To view all of the paperbacks with cover art by Richard Powers that I’ve posted over the years, start here and scroll through the pages.
Connections: Harry Lucey (1964) and Richard Corben (1978)
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VERONICA: Ooh, Archie! Isn’t this the Wildest?
ARCHIE: Yeah! The artist even had to turn the page around to draw it!
Heads Up: “Alex Toth’s Zorro: The Complete Dell Comics Adventures”
Coming in December from Hermes Press:
The publisher’s description:
Comics legend Alex Toth’s piece de resistance, the complete Dell adventures of Zorro, is finally available in a [240-page] full-color, archival hardcover reprint! Toth, who defined how action/adventure stories are told, set the standard for comic book storytelling with his Zorro tales. Cited by comic book artists, historians, and fans as some of Toth’s best work, these stories have been painstakingly digitally reconstructed to look better than the original Dell comic books in this deluxe reprint, which also includes tons of supplemental material.
You can read the first episode of the series, in English (in black and white and in colour) and in Spanish (recoloured), at Horacio Diez’s “CÓMIC, historietas, tebeos…” blog. Here’s the link: ALEX TOTH. LA IMPORTANCIA DE LA EDICIÓN.
You can also read the first episode at tothfans.com, starting here. And at Pappy’s Golden Age Comics Blogzine, right here.
Unfortunately, the one thing that all of those scans have in common is that they are very low resolution.
Ragged Claws Network 