Chip and Dale Rescue Rangers #1

Chip and Dale Rescue Rangers #1
Dec 2010 | 29 pages | CBR | 32.1 MB
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Number 940


John Buscema, Wanted man!


When John Buscema died at age 75 in 2002 he left behind thousands of pages of superhero and fantasy-barbarian artwork for his fans to collect and admire. But like most comic book artists who started in the late 1940s, as he did, the bread-and-butter comic book work was in the genre fields: crime, romance, western, etc. Buscema, who had studied famous illustrators, as well as his comic art gods like Raymond, Foster and Caniff, was a superior artist at depicting "civilian" subjects (non-costumed characters, non-fantasy characters, that is). Looking at these two strips from Orbit Publications' Wanted Comics, you can see all of the things that made Buscema's art great, but in the milieu of the dark, dangerous and dirty world of criminals.

"Gang Doctor" is from Wanted Comics #32, 1950, and "They All Died" is from Wanted Comics #48, 1952:

A Taste of Moronica

This one's a little out of my normal bailiwick, being published in 1952, but I just read this story and found it hilarious. ACG briefly came out with a comic called Dizzy Dames (subtitled Screwballs in Skirts). Nowadays, of course, it would be decried as sexist, but was it back then? Remember, this was the era where comedy duos relied on one dimwit and one straight-man. Were Burns and Allen sexist, or I Love Lucy? And of course it was not uncommon for the shoe to be placed on the other foot; the Honeymooners is a classic example of a sensible wife exasperated with her buffoonish hubby.

Anyway, I loved this story and had to share it with you. Any idea who the artist is? His work is deceptively simple but very expressive.

Number 939


Secret City/Images of Doom


Here's a two-part Flash story from the 1940s, taken from two sources: a reprint from Flash Super-Spectacular #229 from 1974, reprinting the first part, "The Secret City," from All-Flash Comics #31, 1947, and my tear sheets of the second part, "Images of Doom," originally from Flash Comics #94, 1948.

For those of you who came in late to this blog, I've told of my box of tear sheets several times. Over 30 years ago a customer of the bookstore where I worked gave me a box of pages he'd cut from old comic books. He bought comics in the late 1940s, almost all DC, and saved only stories by artists he liked. Carmine Infantino, Joe Kubert, Lee Elias, artists working in the DC house style of the day. I had hundreds of loose pages and I reassembled the stories. As you can see, some of the pages are brittle and damaged.

Both stories were drawn by Carmine Infantino and Frank Giacoia, and written by Robert Kanigher.