Number 1595: Aces up my sleeve

Today we begin a theme week, “Aces Up My Sleeve” week, featuring some very early (1940-41) stories from Ace Publications. Ace, a pulp publisher, entered the comics fray early on with the usual titles devoted to the usual superheroes. In the story today, Magno, the magnetic man.

What jumps out at me with this very early entry for Magno, from Super-Mystery #2 (1940), is not the Harry Lucey artwork, which is very good, but the eye-popping primary colors. Other publishers of the time also used bright colors (Quality and Fox come to mind), but I think this job rises above them, with its imaginative use of colors for an earth-boring machine (page 12). The colorist must have been having fun.

Number 1491: More early Kurtzman

This past September I showed three 1943 humor stories drawn by Harvey Kurtzman. Less than a decade later Kurtzman went on to create Mad and secure his reputation as one of the greatest comic geniuses of all time. The stories showed glimpses of what was to come. To see them click on this link for Pappy's #1446.

Not so these stories, also by Kurtzman. They are crudely drawn superhero stories from Super-Mystery Comics Vol. 3 No. 5 (1943). Harvey was just 18 or 19 when he was a member of the Louis Ferstadt comic art shop. Despite the amateurish quality they are early work by an important figure in comic art history, and in addition I couldn’t resist showing the Buckskin strip, which has some panels of hanged men in a barn. It's the horror comics fan in me coming out. Some years later there were reports that Kurtzman had complained about the horror comics from his employer, EC Comics, saying they would get them in trouble. He was right. I wonder if that was from his experience; perhaps the Buckskin story got criticized for its excesses.