Angelo Torres · Comics · Frank Frazetta · Here, Read · Look Here

Look Here, Read: “The Blank!” with art by Angelo Torres

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From the pages of Strange Stories of Suspense #12 (December 1956), here’s a four-page story with a banal script that is partially redeemed by the vivacious Frazetta-influenced art of Angelo Torres:

The lowest point in the story has to be when Lee says to Dora, “Besides, you’re much too lovely a girl to be so brilliant and absorbed in your work!” That’s casual sexism offered up as a compliment, Holmes. Apparently, whether they’re from the past, the present, or the future, men will be men will be men, all mentally mired in the 1950s.

But wait! Did Lee just say future human civilization has “scanners, to look back into time and send men like me, trouble-shooters of the future, back to the past to take care of things like this”? Hm… now that’s interesting… I wonder who was the first to use the term scanners in SF in connection with time travel and surveillance… and I also wonder if Philip K. Dick ever read this story… LOL!

Book/Magazine Covers (All) · Illustration Art · Look Here · Richard Powers

Look Here: Two more terrific covers by Richard Powers

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I bought these two paperbacks with covers by Richard Powers on Thursday morning at “Poor Michael’s Bookshop, Art, & Cafe” in Onanole, Manitoba, just south of Riding Mountain National Park, along with several increasingly-hard-to-find paperbacks with Robert McGinnis and Paul Lehr covers that I’ll post another time and a delicious cup of dark-roast coffee, black, no sugar. Actually, I have quite a few paperbacks from the fifties and sixties with McGinnis covers that I’d like to post. It’s just a matter of finding the time to scan them and type the captions…

To view all five of the covers by Richard Powers that I’ve posted so far, click here.

Keywords: Destiny Doll, Path into the Unknown.

Book/Magazine Covers (All) · Book/Magazine Covers (Jones) · Illustration Art · Jeffrey "Jeff" Catherine Jones · Look Here

Look Here: Four first-rate covers by Jeffrey Jones

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I purchased the following Andre Norton paperbacks with covers by Jeffrey Jones on Monday from a small shop in Yorkton, Saskatchewan. I found the shop totally by accident. My wife, our son, and I were en route to Dauphin, Manitoba, but since we were ahead of schedule and had some time to kill before lunch in Yorkton, we decided to drive around a bit and see what stores were open in the downtown area. We went up and down a couple of streets, and then we noticed a shop called “Thrifty Mama’s” that had a display of books in the window. Being a trio of bibliophiles, we couldn’t resist checking it out — and discovered that at least half of the floorspace in “Thrifty Mama’s” is dedicated to used books, mostly paperbacks. Score!

Now, I know I’ve posted the cover of Uncharted Stars before, but the book this time around is in much better condition. In fact, all four are really glossy and tight. And they all sport excellent Jones covers. Enjoy!

BONUS IMAGE (added 04 October 2013):

A more recent acquisition:

Keywords: Postmarked to the Stars, Sea Siege, Uncharted Stars, Sargasso of Space.

Al Williamson · Book/Magazine Covers (All) · Book/Magazine Covers (Jones) · Connections · Illustration Art · Jeffrey "Jeff" Catherine Jones · Look Here

Connections: (Jones vs. Jones?) vs. Williamson

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The cover of The Three Faces of Time, which I bought yesterday at a used book store in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, is uncredited, and no signature is visible, but it sure looks like the work of Jeffrey Jones, circa 1968-69, to me.

ABOVE: Jack Williamson, Seetee Shock (New York: Lancer, 1968), with cover by Jeffrey Jones.
jeffrey-jones_the-three-faces-of-time_ny-tower-1969
ABOVE: Frank Belknap Long, The Three Faces of Time (New York: Tower, 1969), with cover by Jeffrey Jones.

UPDATE (24 July 2010):

This just in: reader Patrick Hill points out in the comments section of this post that Jones informed him ten years ago that he (Jones) swiped the pose of the main figure in Seetee Shock and The Three Faces of Time from “H2O World,” with story by Larry Ivie and art by Al Williamson and Roy Krenkel. Here’s the ocular proof:

williamson-krenkel_h20-world_creepy_n1p10_1964
ABOVE: Al Williamson and Roy Krenkel (artists), first page complete, "H2O World," Creepy #1 (1964), page 10.

williamson-krenkel_h20-world_creepy_n1p10_1964_detail
ABOVE: Al Williamson and Roy Krenkel (artists), first page detail, "H2O World," Creepy #1 (1964), page 10.

If nothing else, the above news should make Maroto fans smile.

Keywords: Seetee Shock, The Three Faces of Time.

Obituaries

Rest in Peace: Harvey Pekar (1939 – 2010)

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More sad news for 2010: Cleveland comic-book legend Harvey Pekar dead at age 70 by Joanna Connors of The Plain Dealer.

FORMAL OBITUARIES:

The Comics Reporter: Harvey Pekar, 1939-2010 by Tom Spurgeon

The New York Times: Harvey Pekar, ‘American Splendor’ Creator, Dies at 70 by William Grimes

INTERVIEWS:

The Comics Journal: Gary Groth Interviews Harvey Pekar (1984) Part One of Two

The Comics Journal: Gary Groth Interviews Harvey Pekar (1984) Part Two of Two

The Comics Journal: Gary Groth interviews Harvey Pekar (1993)

NOTICES AND TRIBUTES:

Alison Bechdel: very sad news

Anthony Bourdain’s Blog: The Original (Goodbye Splendor) by Anthony Bourdain

BenAdamsArts.com: R. I. P. Harvey Pekar by Ben Adams

The Comics Journal: Harvey Pekar: An Appreciation by Rob Clough

The Comics Journal: HARVEY PEKAR, 1939-2010 by Jared Gardner

The Comics Journal: The Determination to Be an Artist by R. Fiore

Fantagraphics Books: FLOG! Blog: Harvey Pekar, R.I.P. by Eric Reynolds

The Huffington Post: Harvey Pekar Dead: ‘American Splendor’ Comic Book Author Dies At 70 by Thomas J. Sheeran and Jake Coyle

Los Angeles Times: Harvey Pekar: An Appreciation by David Ulin, Los Angeles Times Book Critic, who writes:

Pekar, by all accounts, was a tough guy to be around: angry, confrontational, beset by grudges and troubles over money, an obsessive worrier. He never hid any of this, but wrote about it instead. That made him as brave as almost any artist I can think of — unadorned, unfiltered, less concerned with how the world thought of him than with how he thought of himself. It also made him an essential aesthetic bridge between, say, Will Eisner, who mined the lives of ordinary people in his 1978 graphic novel “A Contract with God,” and contemporary artists such as Jessica Abel, Adrian Tomine and Alison Bechdel, whose comics traverse a similar existential territory, in which the mundane (and sometimes not-so-mundane) material of daily life becomes the substance of their work.

News from Me: Harvey Pekar, R.I.P. by Mark Evanier

NYTimes.com ArtsBeat Blog: Harvey Pekar, Who Chronicled Ordinary Lives in ‘American Splendor’ Comics, Dies by Dave Itzkoff

The Washington Post: Comic Riffs: Remembering Harvey Pekar, legendary bard of the ‘underground’ comic book by Michael Cavna

Connections · Frank Frazetta · Steve Ditko

Connections: Frank Frazetta and Steve Ditko

RC2 Comments

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.

Dave Cooper · Heads Up!

Heads Up: “Bent” by Dave Cooper

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From 26 June through 24 July 2010, Jonathan LeVine Gallery is hosting Mangle — new drawings and paintings of twisted ladies, an exhibition of graphite drawings on polypropylene paper and oil paintings on canvas by Ottawa-based artist Dave Cooper. It is Cooper’s second solo show at the gallery, but more importantly for those of us who have been following Cooper’s career from afar, Fantagraphics Books plans to reproduce “most, if not all, of the work in the show” in a new Dave Cooper art book entitled Bent. Here’s the info currently up at Amazon.ca:

Bent [Hardcover]
Dave Cooper (Author, Artist)

List Price: CDN$ 24.01
Price: CDN$ 17.32 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over CDN$ 39.
You Save: CDN$ 6.69 (28%)

Product Details

* Hardcover: 80 pages
* Publisher: Fantagraphics Books (Oct 12 2010)
* Language: English
* ISBN-10: 160699378X
* ISBN-13: 978-1606993781
* Product Dimensions: 26 x 22.9 x 2.5 cm

Product Description

Bent collects Cooper’s finest, most revealing paintings, ink drawings, pencil sketches, and photographs from the past five years, many of which enjoy homes in the collections of influential collectors and some of Hollywood’s elite. In this monograph, Dave Cooper continues to obsess and fixate over his bizarre procession of milky figures as they crawl and wriggle into hidden meadows, jungles and cities. Everything in this world seems to be undulating and overripe-the multi-colored Jell-O vegetation, the billowing clouds, and the twitching, agitated women, whether thin like sinewy rubber, or fat and bursting with doughy flesh. The characters in Cooper’s work have been likened to a dog chasing its tail. Or maybe it’s as though they’re like someone on drugs who can stare at their own hand for 20 minutes; either way, these girls are hypnotized by wriggling around on the ground, twisting in on themselves, walking on their hands, squeezing and chewing one another. This fine art may sound hellish, but to the demons, hell must seem like heaven. So maybe Cooper’s landscapes are more like a weird kind of utopia where all those insane facial expressions and physical contortions are more an expression of elation or giddiness.

BONUS LINK FOR NEW VISITORS TO THIS BLOG:

Look Here: Our Teeny-Tiny Drawing by Hector Mumbly, a.k.a. Dave Cooper

Connections · Illustration Art · Norman Rockwell

Connections: Norman Rockwell vs. Myron Fass

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I’m not a big fan of Norman Rockwell, but as I was browsing through an old romance comic, what to my wondering eyes should appear but more fodder for an irregular feature here at RCN entitled “Connections.”

The story, “Powerhouse of Deceit!,” from Dream of Love #9, is uncredited, but GCD identifies the penciller and inker as Myron Fass. The comic was published in 1958, but the story, apparently, is a reprint from Great Lover Romances #3, Toby Press, 1951 series.

(Hey, trivia fans! Do you know who was art director and comics editor at Toby Press in 1951? Here’s a hint: I mentioned it in a previous post. That’s right: it was none other than the creator of the comic strips “Miss Peach” and “Momma,” Mell Lazarus, though I think he still spelled his first name “Mel” at that time.)

Norman Rockwell’s famous illustration, Strictly a Sharpshooter, is from 1941.