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.
Out of Context: “But maybe I can find a way to concoct a GROWTH SERUM!”
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.
Look There: Better things for BETTER THINGS?
Well would you look at that! When the Kickstarter for Maria Paz Cabardo’s documentary film Better Things: The Life and Choices of Jeffrey Catherine Jones failed to reach its goal — and shame on everyone who didn’t support it — I sent my donation to Maria via PayPal anyway, and then, after a few months in 2011 when the film’s website seemed devoid of all life, I sort of forgot about the whole thing. Well, turns out, I shouldn’t have given up hope, because this morning I finally thought to check on the film’s progress and was pleasantly surprised to discover that the promotional site has been updated with a new design and new content, including comps of three different posters designed by John Pinsky. Take a look. And what’s more, this morning I also stumbled across an old post by Arnie Fenner, who back in March of this year announced on the Muddy Colors blog that the film is complete: “It’s edited. It’s scored. It’s a wrap.”
No word yet if and when DVDs will be available for purchase, but I do hope it’s soon! Because there is not a snowball’s chance in hell that Better Things will ever show in a theatre near me. More’s the pity…
Pinsky designed another, slightly more provocative poster for the film, but it’s only available on the film’s website as a tiny thumbnail at the moment:
Connections: Luis Ricardo Falero and Jeffrey Jones
I saw the painting Crescent Moon (a.k.a., Moon Nymph) by nineteenth-century Spanish painter and astronomy enthusiast Luis Ricardo Falero for the first time about an hour ago, when I read an article about Falero’s work that Ron Miller wrote for io9 and posted earlier today. And as is my wont, I immediately noticed a possible connection between one of Falero’s paintings and an SF illustration by one of my favourite artists, Jeffrey Jones, the promotion of whose work has been a frequent theme of my posts here at RCN (although not so much lately as it has been in the past):
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BONUS IMAGE (added 27 December 2013):
Ragged Claws Network 