Number 1009





Ellery Queen and the corpse that killed





We featured the Saint on Friday, Perry Mason on Monday, and we're following it up with Ellery Queen. The Saint, Mason and Ellery Queen were born in the golden era of the pulps as leads in detective novels. The Saint was created by Leslie Charteris. Mason was created by prolific Erle Stanley Gardner (who got to a point where he had six secretaries transcribing his tape recorded story dictation). Ellery was created by Manfred Lee and Fred Dannay under the name Ellery Queen.



Unlike this comic book story, which depends on the pseudo-horror angle and less on detecting, the Ellery Queen of the novels is a detective in very clever whodunnits with clues provided for the reader. There was much less finesse and writing skill in this comic book story, but it's still entertaining. The art is by an artist so far unidentified. The style looks familiar, one of those things where I can almost put my finger on whodunnit, but not quite. That's the biggest mystery of "The Corpse That Killed": whodrewit?



At least we know that Norman Saunders did the painted cover for this Ziff-Davis comic.



From Ellery Queen #1, 1952:

The Other Showcase

Back when I was a young teen collecting comics, I remember picking up this issue at a garage sale and boggling:



Under "Still 10 cents" it says "No. 1115". I was flabbergasted. I knew that Ricky Nelson had starred with the rest of his family in The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet for a very long time (in fact, that show is still the second longest-running sitcom in US history, behind only the Simpsons), and that he'd had some success as a rock star, but the idea that his comic had over five times as many issues as Superman (back then) was simply impossible to conceive.



And, of course, it wasn't true.



DC did not originate the concept of a tryout magazine, where new features could be tested to see if they sold. They borrowed the idea from Dell Comics, which had a series simply entitled Four Color Comics. Dell published approximately 1350 issues under that name, which I believe is still the all-time record for a single series in the United States, even though the last Four Color issue was published in 1962. Since the first issue appeared in 1942, it is obvious that they put out about 60 comics a year under this line, or five per month. And four of those issues, not 1100+, featured young Mr Nelson.



The Four Color line included the debuts of many long-running series for Dell and its later successors, including Donald Duck, (#9), Felix the Cat (#15), Roy Rogers (#38), Little Lulu (#74), Pogo (#105), Woody Woodpecker (#169). Of course those features had appeared elsewhere, but these were the tryouts that got them their own comic titles. Four Color also featured the first appearance anywhere of Uncle Scrooge (#178).



The Four Color series did create one problem which caused endless anxiety for collectors in the days before the Overstreet Guide. Dell would run, say, four tryout issues for Spin and Marty (a serial about two boys on a dude ranch that ran on TV in the Mickey Mouse Club), spaced out over a number of months, and if the sales justified it, they would start issuing the feature in its own magazine, starting with #5. Which meant that collectors might search forever for the elusive #s 1-4, not realizing that they bore issue #s 714, 767, 808 and 826 on the covers.



As if that wasn't complicated enough, Four Color was actually two series; there were 25 issues in Volume One, and 1300+ in V2. To add to the confusion, while the last issue of V2 was #1354, there were numerous missing issues in the last 100 or so; for example, there is no #1351, #1352 or #1353.



The most valuable issues in the Four Color line are generally the early Donald Duck appearances by Carl Barks, but there are plenty of cheap issues from the 1940s-1960s offering fine quality entertainment.

Bob Powell's TERROR: Yoe Books Cover Vote!

The latest hardcover collection in Craig Yoe's "Chilling Archives of Horror Comics" book series focuses on legendary comic creator, Bob Powell. With his truly distinct, one of a kind style, Powell helped shape and define the Golden and Silver Age of comic books, working for the Eisner-Iger studios in the late 1930s and launching a multitude of timeless characters like Sheena and Blackhawk, as well as pencilling the now infamous "Mars Attacks" original trading card series, just to name a few. Yoe Books' covers all of this amazing comic book history and more, and then pummels you with a huge selection of terrifying stories from Powell's best pre-code horror work, (culled from Craig and Karswell's own private collections!) And now the big question: "

Which cover do we use for the book?

After you decide which of the 4 gruesome ghouls we should put on the cover, head over to Yoe Book's Facebook page to CAST YOUR VOTE! Simply click "like" on your frightful fave, and if we get over 100 voters, we will draw 3 names to win an autographed copy of the book! Please help spread the word, and if you're not a Facebook friend to Yoe Books already, simply go HERE and join all the other cool comic book creeps by clicking the "like" button!

NOTE: Voting ends Fri. Sept. 2nd at midnight. Winning cover and book winners announced on Monday September 5th at noon. Don't wait, VOTE NOW!!

Number 1008





Mort Drucker's Perry Mason





"The Night Perry Masonmint Lost A Case" is a favorite of mine, from Mad #48, 1959. Not only am I a fan of of artist Mort Drucker, but I also remember the Raymond Burr TV show with fondness. I watched it every week.



I downloaded the scans of the original art from Heritage Auctions. It went through some production phases in which it was cleaned up, where the bleed edges of the panel borders were covered up, giving it a neater appearance than it had in its primary state. Like many artists whose work was done for black line printing, Drucker used Craftint paper, "painting" with the chemical that brought out the ben day effects. That paper became known as Grafix, and is now no longer produced. (The end of an era.)



The first Perry Mason series lasted for nine seasons on CBS, and there was a time when he actually lost a case on television (CNN did some research at some point and found out he actually lost three of three hundred, not a bad track record). I remember the hoopla around that first "losing" episode. I wonder if this satire gave some Perry Mason producer or writer the idea.

Too Timid to Live / Davey and His Dame

Time for "Bad Blondes Double Header Fest: Part Two", both tales from the Sept. '53 issue of Journey into Unknown Worlds #22 ...the first story may be signed by John Forte, but if you ask me, the Matt Fox assist completely removed all traces of anything even remotely resembling Forte's style. Then our second atmospheric tale is illustrated by one of my underated favorites, Cal Massey!

Cover art by Bill Everett

Number 1007





Dead men--and women--tell no tales





Saddle Justice was an EC Comics entry into the field of Western-themed comic books, before they got into the New Trend comics that would make them infamous.



I like the alliterative titles of these stories, and the female protagonists, both of whom are as rough-and-tumble, if not more so, than the men they go up against. Johnny Craig did "The Lady Longrider" and Graham Ingels drew "The Grinning Gun Girl," setting the mood on the first page with the symbolic skull.



[SPOILER ALERT] The lessons of "Gun Girl" are muddled, especially in the last three panels when the law closes in. The posse decides to shoot down psychotic Sally "in cold blood" because it's the "only way we can stop her from killing more people!" The sheriff would rather "take her in alive. . .[but] no sense in running any more risk with a killer like her!" so they shoot her. As she lays dead the sheriff moralizes, "Reckon she was a bad one...human life didn't mean a thing to her it seems!" That's because even in death she has her grin and after shooting her in cold blood, he says, "See, she's still grinning! Sure was cold-blooded...even about her own death!" The code of the West in action! Another crime comics ending, where the law is just as brutal as the criminals they are chasing.



From Saddle Justice #6, 1949: