The Seventies, Ain’t It?

I hate that “Bronze Age” comics designation, with a beginning and end no-one seems to agree upon… because, well, it’s arbitrary. So let’s just focus on the numerical decade, shall we?

Way Off-Model Archie, or ‘Escaping the Big Two’

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« Our Betty Cooper is still the girl next door – she literally lives next to Archie. And she’s the blonde all-American girl; she’s so sweet and forgiving, gives people the benefit of the doubt and second chances, wears her heart on her sleeve. But she’s also incredibly broken on the inside, for many different reasons. » — Lili Reinhart

As a whole, comic book artists are not a happy lot, and for good reason. During the Golden Age, at least, there were countless publishers, so one could move around if unsatisfied with the working conditions.. even if meant finding out that things were rotten all over. After the mid-1950s, when the field violently contracted — you know the story — leaving scant players standing, you pretty much had to take the work, and the abuse, as they came. And certain publishers frowned upon ‘their’ creators playing what little remained of the field.

Kurt Schaffenberger had steady work at DC, but presumably — and understandably — sought to keep his options open, so he moonlighted for ACG, often under a pseudonym, probably unaware that the ‘competitor’ was covertly owned (at least in part) by DC co-founder and co-owner Harry Donenfeld. One can imagine Kurt’s distress when ACG folded in 1967. From what I can surmise, he did, in 1970, a lone, inexplicable cover for Stanley Morse… wildly outside his range but still kind of awesome. And then… he quietly boarded a bus to Riverdale.

A page from Voice of Doom; script by Frank Doyle, pencils by Schaffenberger, inks by Jon D’Agostino. Published in Archie’s TV Laugh-Out no. 16 (Dec. 1972, Archie).
The, er… punchline from Peace of Mind. Script by Frank Doyle, pencils by Schaffenberger, inks (likely) by Chic Stone; published in Archie’s TV Laugh-Out no. 18 (Mar. 1972, Archie).
Drawing for Archie wasn’t too much of a stretch for Kurt; whether it was Reggie or The Big Red Cheese getting knocked on his ass, he had his stock posture. This is Shazam no. 22 (Jan-Feb. 1976, DC). Pencils and inks by Mr. Schaffenberger.

A couple more samples from Mr. Schaffenberger’s all-too-brief Archie period — solid, well-paced, ably-designed and economical storytelling:

A slightly surreal one-pager from Archie’s Joke Book Magazine no. 150 (July 1970, Archie).
A page from Luck Struck, published in Archie’s Pals ‘n’ Gals no. 73 (Oct. 1972, Archie); note the Captain Marvel tank top young Mr. Andrews is sporting!

And then, there’s the case of Sal Amendola, a Neal Adams protégé whose reputation in comic books largely rests on a single Batman story, 1974’s ‘Night of the Stalker’, a highly praised tale whose chief conceits is that Batman never utters a word and weeps bitterly at the end. I’d apologise for the spoilers, but honestly, it’s been half a century, what mystery is there to dispel?

An excerpt from Detective Comics no. 439 (Feb.-Mar. 1974, DC); I’ll rarely say this, but Dick Giordano’s inks are an asset in this case, not a liability. The story’s scripting credits are at once hilarious and a bit sad: Steve Englehart, script; Vin and Sal Amendola, plot; and… “from an incident as described by Neal Adams.” Yeah, Neal; that’ll surely earn you a Pulitzer.

Anyway, after his turn in the Bat-spotlight and 1975’s Phoenix, one of the short-lived Atlas-Seaboard‘s more daring titles, Amendola turned up at… Archie. And it was not a good fit.

This, in fact, was the springboard for this post: a couple of years ago, I encountered an Archie story that so grotesquely missed the mark — stylistically speaking — that it bordered on the fascinating. You guessed it, Sal Amendola, utterly out of his element, not to mention, surprisingly… his depth.

Here are a pair of pages from Coach Reproach, published in Everything’s Archie no. 71 (Dec. 1978, Archie), script by George Gladir, pencils by Amendola, inks by Jon D’Agostino.

Where to begin? In the first panel, you give Archie a stiff, unnatural pose and you follow it up by repeating it on a background character in the very next panel. And Arch is due for a nasty case of whiplash if he keeps trying to make like Linda Blair.
At this point, I’m thinking Sal had learned plenty from his mentor on how to utterly fail at comedy.
If what I’ve observed about pitching stances is worth anything, Archie’s about to get brained by a baseball. Ginger boy is also looking right past Coach Kleats. Despite the low bar — issues of quality control were rampant at Archie in the 1970s — this is impressively incompetent storytelling,
What happens when you never learn basic inking principles: one creates depth by using thinner lines — and less detail — on background characters, otherwise… visual chaos ensues, as demonstrated here. And Sal’s Betty and Veronica sorely need a brand of shampoo that won’t leave their hair so oily and limp… but the anatomy is beyond help. This is the opening page of The Specialty, from Pep no. 342 (Oct. 1978, Archie).

Schaffenberger’s fellow Golden Age veteran, Gene Colan, also found himself moonlighting in the 1960s. In his case, it was for Marvel, under the alias of ‘Adam Austin’, but also for Dell (just a couple of covers mid-decade) and more significantly for Warren Magazines. In the 1970s, he concentrated on Marvel and was, in the chaos that was the so-called ‘House of Ideas’ at the time, the single most reliable artist in the maelström: surely none can match his seventy consecutive — and meticulously detailed — issues of Tomb of Dracula, in addition to lengthy runs on Howard the Duck, Daredevil, Captain America, Doctor Strange and so forth.

Enter Jim Shooter, a man only Vinnie Colletta could love.

« When writer Jim Shooter became Marvel’s editor-in-chief in the late ‘70s, the tension between Colan and the younger authors came to a head. By 1980, Shooter and Colan were totally at odds with one another over Colan’s approach to storytelling. »

« [Shooter] was harassing the life out of me. I couldn’t make a living,” Colan said. “He frightened me, he really did. He upset me so bad I couldn’t function.” Just as she had urged Colan to quit one job [in] the 1960s, wife Adrienne begged him to leave Marvel in 1980. After delivering his resignation, Colan was asked to sit down and seek resolution with Shooter and publisher Mike Hobson. Colan agreed to the meeting, but declined any overtures to stay at Marvel. “Shooter was in the same room,” Colan recalled, “and I said, ‘That man’s not gonna change. He is what he is. Whether it’s six days, six months or six years, it’s not going to be any different, so I’m not going to put up with it for another minute.‘ » [ source ]

He then scampered over to DC for a few years. His production there was hit-and-miss, but his Batman run (1981-86) was outstanding, pairing him with some of the rare inkers who could do his nuanced pencils justice: Klaus Janson, Tony De Zuñiga (to my amazed delight!) and especially Alfredo Alcala.

But once his contract ran out, he was out knocking on doors again. Against all odds, Archie beckoned.

This is the cover — dreadful, I’m afraid — of Jughead no. 17 (Apr. 1990, Archie), reviving the opportunistic, Batman TV show-derived ‘Riverdale Gang as superheroes’ de trop move of the mid-1960s, with even less aplomb. But then the Archie folks were plumbing an especially low point with such ‘experimental’ titles as Jughead’s Diner, Archie 3000, Dilton’s Strange Science, Jughead’s Time Police, Archie’s R/C Racers, Explorers of the Unknown, and of course The Adventures of Bayou Billy.
An action-packed — and Colan-shambolic — excerpt from that issue’s Hatman saga, written by Robert Loren Fleming, pencilled by Colan and inked by Rudy Lapick. Notwithstanding his sticking out like the proverbial sore thumb, Colan clearly had a ball working on his Archie stories. He brought some urgently needed chutzpah to a perilously stale formula.
A page from Will the Real Archie Please Stand Up!, published in Life with Archie no. 273 (July 1989, Archie), wherein Archie is mistaken for his doppelgänger, a foreign prince named Kafoufi… but of course. Pencilled *and* scripted by Colan, which is most unusual. Oh, and inked by Mr. Lapick, who doesn’t quite know what to do with those ol’ Colan worm-fingers, seen wriggling in panel five.

-RG

Slug Signorino, Good Buddy

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« Arrows of neon and flashing marquees out on Main Street / Chicago, New York, Detroit and it’s all on the same street / Your typical city involved in a typical daydream / Hang it up and see what tomorrow brings » — Robert Hunter

Among the foremost pleasures of a brick-and-mortar bookstore is the increased odds of stumbling upon an item whose existence you never suspected: case in point, another cheap (one buck!) gem I scooped up in Ellsworth, ME’s The Big Chicken Barn last Autumn.

Now — I’ve long been a huge fan of the pseudonymous Cecil Adams‘ sassy syndicated answer column The Straight Dope (1975-2018), in no small part thanks to resident — all the merry way! — illustrator Michele ‘Slug’ Signorino‘s waggish accompanying cartoons, rendered in what he colourfully called his ‘smudge-a-dot technique’.

And so, last October, I grabbed a lovely Scholastic publication that had until now ably eluded my radar — 1978’s Junior CB Picture Dictionary, compiled and edited by Joan Downing and dexterously illuminated by the aforementioned Mr. Signorino. I was delighted to discover that he’s still happily active well into his Eighties: « he still works and does not intend to retire. “This isn’t work,” he said. »

This slim-but-priceless tome happens to tick several of my pet boxes: a somewhat (but not quite!) passé communication technology; a lively, singular species of jargon; a merrily anarchic illustrative style… and so forth. Let’s sneak a peek, then!

Checking My Eyelids for Pinholes: Tired; getting sleepy.
City Kitty: Local police.
County Mounty: Sheriff or county police.
Draggin’ Wagon: Wrecker or tow truck.
Eatem Up Stop: A truckstop.
Flagwaver: Road construction worker.
Haircut Palace: A low bridge or overpass. There’s one of these a couple of blocks up the street from where I used to live, but I suppose every big city has to live with that problem. In Boston, MA, the phenomenon is particularly colourful, as is called ‘Storrowing‘.
Mama Bear: Female police officer.
Mixing Bowl: Highway cloverleaf.
Motor Mouth (Also: Ratchet Jaw): One who talks too much.
Rat Race: Traffic during rush hour.
Skating Rink: Road slippery from ice, snow, or rain.
Super Skate: Sports car.
Truckin’ Teenybopper: Young hitchhiker. The bulk of my first-hand experience with CB came from hitchhiking in my youth so I indeed was a truckin’ teenybopper myself! I’m still warmly grateful for the longest ride I ever got: from Portland, OR, to Long Beach, CA, thanks to a friendly truck driving man. He was actually headed for San Diego, but I was already over three thousand miles from home… and had to get back in time for college.
Wall to Wall and Ten Feet Tall: Good CB reception. A visual reference to famous pooch ‘Nipper‘.
Window Washer: Rain. Is that you, Dirty Danny?

For more dirt on the magnificent Signor Signorino, feast your peepers on this lovely 2022 profile. And in case you’re wondering “Does Slug have a book about his career?”, why yes, he certainly does!

I’ll let Steve Earle have the last jab at this one: « Everybody told me you can’t get far/On thirty-seven dollars and a Jap guitar/Now I’m smokin’ into Texas with the hammer down*/And a rocking little combo from the Guitar Town**. »

– RG

*Driving fast
**Nashville, Tennessee

And Now a Word From Our Sponsor

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« Advertising – A judicious mixture of flattery and threats. » — Stephen Leacock

It’s long been established that one can scarcely be too skeptical in the face of advertising, and the sooner one starts questioning its wooly claims, the better. In the early 1950s, Harvey Kurtzman‘s Mad shone the giddily harsh light of truth on, well, just about everything, but Madison Avenue‘s tactics were a favourite and frequent target, and for good reason. In 1956, Kurtzman heatedly left his creation after a mere 28 issues; while it retained much of its cultural influence as its reach increased, it degenerated into rigid formula in the hands of his too-cautious successor at the helm, Al Feldstein.

Fast-forward to 1974, and Dynamite Magazine‘s sixth issue. Readers presumably too young for Mad could now receive their monthly inoculation against the advertising industry’s tainted baloney.

From 1974 to 1981, the feature was illustrated by Calvin Sanford “Sandy” Huffaker, Sr. (1943 – 2020); then the reins were passed into the able paws of future Mad art director (small world!) Sam Viviano. But that’s a tale for another day.

Since Huffaker was only credited for illustrating the feature, it stands to reason that it was written in-house, and that narrows it down to two main candidates: editor Jane Stine or Linda Williams Aber (aka “Magic Wanda”); my money’s on Aber, who also wrote Count Morbida’s Puzzle Monthly Puzzle Pages.

As Dynamite’s ‘Inside Stuff’ table of contents always billed it, here’s « A Dynamite look at BADvertising »!

The feature’s inaugural entry, from Dynamite no. 6 (Dec. 1974, Scholastic). The voracious oldster lampooned here is Euell Gibbons, who shilled for Post Grape-Nuts (which contain neither grapes nor nuts!) in this vintage commercial.
From Dynamite no. 7 (Jan. 1975, Scholastic). You might recognize Nancy Walker, aka Rhoda’s mom Ida, and future director of Can’t Stop the Music! (trigger warning: Steve Guttenberg); here she is, pre-orange hair, in a Bounty Paper Towel spot from the Me Decade.
From Dynamite no. 9 (Mar. 1975, Scholastic). Here’s a 1971 Bufferin vs. Aspirin ad. Place your bets!
From Dynamite no. 19 (Jan. 1976, Scholastic). You just may be familiar with the object of this parody.
From Dynamite no. 25 (July 1976, Scholastic). Here’s another ‘wonderful, quick‘ Jell-o recipe from those gelatin-happy days.
From Dynamite no. 26 (Aug. 1976, Scholastic). Remember Morris? Here’s the famously fussy feline in a 1974 Nine Lives ad.
From Dynamite no. 27 (Sept. 1976, Scholastic). Here’s a Hamburger Helper commercial of the corresponding vintage.
From Dynamite no. 28 (Oct. 1976, Scholastic). Here’s our pal Poppin’ Fresh in a 1972 commercial.
From Dynamite no. 37 (July 1977, Scholastic). On that topic, here’s our look at the 1970s bubble gum explosion!
This subscription ad appeared in Dynamite no. 26. I suspect it was a draft for issue 28’s more focused Laverne and Shirley cover, which had been previewed in ads as a photo cover.
From 1971, young Sandy wears his Ed Sorel influence a little heavily, but he was learning fast and from the best! For those who may not know — or who’ve forgotten — David Frye was possibly the nation’s premier Tricky Dick Nixon imitator. Was he? Listen here and judge for yourself!

Thanks to his versatility and ability to nail a likeness, Huffacker was among the most sought-after illustrators of the 1970s. Quoting from the Chattanoogan.com’s obituary:

« Huffaker was a highly acclaimed political cartoonist who started his career with The Birmingham News and the Raleigh News and Observer. He later moved to New York City and illustrated covers and articles for such publications such as Time Magazine, The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, Businessweek, People and Fortune Magazine. Some of the accolades awarded for his artwork include two Page-One Awards from the New York Newspaper Guild, three nominations for Cartoonist-of-the-Year by the National Cartoonists Society, A Desi Award of Excellence (Graphic Design Magazine), 20 Award of Merit citations from the Society of Illustrators, and was twice nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for illustration. »

Here’s one of his aforementioned Time covers.

In a 2012 interview, he recalled those halcyon days: « During one week at the peak of his career as an illustrator, Sandy Huffaker had assignments from Time, Sports Illustrated and Businessweek. He had to turn down a fourth assignment that week from Newsweek. “I just didn’t have time.” »

-RG

Hallowe’en Countdown VII, Day 22

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« Mummy Mush! » — Count Morbida

The 1965-1975 decade sure provided popular culture with a generous array of unforgettable vampires, among them Barnabas Collins (1967), Count Chocula (1971), Con Von Count and Blacula, both 1972… and of course the ever-playful Count Morbida (1974).

Five years to the day, we have been granted (mercy me!) another audience with that most colourful of neck-nibblers — do watch out, he’s quite a tricky one!

An earlier, darker (so to speak) version of Morbida, which appeared in Dynamite no. 5 (Nov. 1974, Scholastic). All text by Linda Williams Aber and illustrations by Arthur Friedman.
The Count tries his hand at operating a fruit stand in Dynamite no. 21 (March 1976, Scholastic).
Morbida went to the hop in Dynamite no. 24 (June 1976, Scholastic), cover-featuring Elvis the Pelvis.
This lovely Holiday greeting card was provided with Dynamite no. 30 (Dec. 1976, Scholastic).
The Count is all at sea in Dynamite no. 33 (March 1977, Scholastic), which cover-featured The Captain and Tennille!
This sheet of party stickers was throw in with Dynamite no. 12 (June 1975, Scholastic), which cover-featured the good Count.

-RG

World Contact Day: Another Audience With… The Hoaxmaster!

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« We all have a thirst for wonder. It’s a deeply human quality. Science and religion are both bound up with it. What I’m saying is, you don’t have to make stories up, you don’t have to exaggerate. There’s wonder and awe enough in the real world. Nature’s a lot better at inventing wonders than we are. » ― Carl Sagan, Contact

Time to keep a promise — a promise to myself, but just as worthy of being kept. A couple of years ago, I posted the first half of a favourite comics feature of mine, ‘The Hoaxmaster’, which ran in most issues of Gold Key’s UFO Flying Saucers in the 1970s. At the time, I declared that I might get around to posting the second half of the set some World Contact Day, which is today.

The bracing brand of skepticism demonstrated here by the Hoaxmaster, much needed as it was then — smack in the middle of the UFO-Spiritualism-Occultism mania of its era — is yet more urgently needed these days, as the merry-go-round of surreal disinformation spins faster and faster, further out of control with each passing day, it would seem. You may have noticed.

From UFO Flying Saucers no. 9 (Jan. 1976, Gold Key); as with all the Hoaxmaster vignettes, script by Pat Fortunato and artwork by Frank Bolle.
From UFO Flying Saucers no. 10 (May 1976, Gold Key).
From UFO Flying Saucers no. 11 (Aug. 1976, Gold Key).
This was the issue in question, my introduction to the title; it bore this terrific — downright terrifying — painted cover by George Wilson.
From UFO Flying Saucers no. 12 (Nov. 1976, Gold Key). Adamski!
From UFO Flying Saucers no. 13 (Jan. 1977, Gold Key). Bolle was always a solid artist — which is certainly why he enjoyed such a long and busy career — but I can’t think of any, among the myriad of features he worked on, where he seemed to enjoy himself this much. His work always had a deadpan grace, but here, the wit deployed in the scripts allows him to reveal a seldom-seen facet of his talent.

-RG

Unsettling Lands Between Girlhood and Womanhood: Trots and Bonnie

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« Bonnie and Pepsi are obsessed with sex, but they’re not there for the male gaze. Their desire is frank and straightforward and more than a little demented, and it’s depicted with a bracing honesty that feels less like a political statement and more like Flenniken is reporting from the front lines with no filter, no safety net, and no intention of telling anything but the truth. »*

I first came across a Shary Flenniken‘s Trots and Bonnie strip in some random issue of National Lampoon. I can’t even really narrow down the decade**, as it ran within its pages from 1972 all the way to 1990. I was intrigued, but not enough to pursue it.

When New York Review Comics published a Trots and Bonnie collection in 2021, gathering 160 strips in a handsome hardcover volume, I was happy to finally be able to partake of T&B in a more organized fashion. One perplexing thing about this collection is that some strips were omitted due to concerns of misinterpretation***. It was apparently feared that some topics would be too controversial, or that the modern reader has lost the ability to interpret things in context. I would have liked the possibility of deciding what has or hasn’t aged well for myself. As it stands, this collection features strips offering a most varied list of topics to horrify the easily triggered (rape, racial epithets, kids getting shot, electrocuted and castrated – albeit by other kids – and pedophilia), so I am truly curious what the censored strips were about. I guess I am now doomed to collect National Lampoon issues (to be fair, the latter was home to many a great cartoonist – Rick Geary, M.K. Brown, Stan Mack, etc.)

Trots and Bonnie is a hilarious strip, and it’s also quite unsettling in the best of ways. While both cartoonists would surely be offended by this comparison, it makes me think of some of Charles Rodrigues’ work (see Charles Rodrigues’ Pantheon of Scabrous Humour) – the same electrifying unwillingness to shy away from difficult topics, although Flenniken was doing it to make a point, and Rodrigues would do it for sheer perversity. More than once while reading T&B I would start wondering how far a certain storyline would go – and it went all the way to its logical (call it immoral, call it stomach-churning…) conclusion. Just take the Dr. Pepsi’s Vasectomy Clinic from 1974, a panel from which made it as the cover of the collection –

« Two youngish girls, dressed as medical professionals, appear to be playing doctor with a young boy, who lies under a sheet, grinning blankly at the viewer while one of the girls, brandishing a pair of scissors, cheerfully communicates something to the other one. A sweet-looking dog with fancy eyelashes lies at their feet. It’s only once you know the particular strip it comes from, in which Pepsi (the shorter firecracker) and Bonnie (the taller girl) attempt to give neighbor kid Elrod a vasectomy and wind up referring to themselves as a sex-change clinic, that you blanch a bit at the art choice. There you go. That’s “Trots and Bonnie” in a nutshell. » [source]

Boys are sometimes disconcerted by Pepsi’s aggressive style of lechery, but they’re mostly on board. To once again quote Emily Blake, ‘what Flenniken understands and brings gleefully to the page is that adolescent girlhood is positively feral and that teenage girls are both threatened and threats themselves.’ Given that highschools are breeding grounds for boys cruelly bullying flat-chested girls, I can see why Flenniken decided to flip the tables.
There’s so much to unpack here – Trots as the voice of the male gaze, female camaraderie, the hilarious but tragic response of the woman to the suggestion of cream (eliciting a sort semi-guffaw, semi-yelp from this reader), a hint at social unrest caused by police brutality, and that’s just skimming the surface. Flenniken says, ‘You might say I was taking the subject lightly here, but at least I was introducing this to an audience that wasn’t going to see anything like this anywhere else‘. Amen.

It’s also a charming strip, with a heroïne who is refreshingly in no hurry to grow up (despite being prodded into it by her early bloomer friend Pepsi, ‘dressed in incongruously childlike pinafore paired with fishnets, a perfect metaphor for the terrifying underage sex fiend she is’). Bonnie dresses like a tomboy, hates going out with her parents, and collects sex magazines and prophylactics like other kids collect marbles. In a world of sleazy men with a creepy predilection for pre-adolescent flesh, she somehow manages to remain an innocent, and shrug off any unpleasantness in favour of a wide-eyed curiosity about everything, be it boys’ cock sizes or sci-fi movies.

I can 100% relate to the thrill of first seeing a naked man (well, maybe not a dead one, though), and at that age I would probably be running around with a jar of lymph nodes as well, given half a chance.
I’ve included more ‘innocent’ strips to showcase that Bonnie is a normal kid with a normal (if staid as hell, especially for the 70s) set of parents. It seems that Flenniken’s friend Mark Evanier suggested Trots’ punchline.
Will men find this strip as hilarious as I do? No idea. But it reminds me of today’s conversation with a (male, gay) colleague, in which he learned that women usually have two or three categories of underwear and spent the rest of the day marvelling at this fact.
I find it charming that there’s someone for everyone in this scene – neither group is focussing on the one best-looking member (accidental pun) to the exclusion of everybody else, but developing an inclusive cloud of lust.
‘I’m partial to gay male porn. And so is Bonnie’s mom now. If you can’t figure out why, you don’t need to know.’
The ridiculous (and lascivious, yuck – Bonnie’s body language makes it clear she is very much creeped out) approach of the psychiatrist is tempered by the punchline – Trots really can talk!

In case that isn’t clear, I heartily recommend purchasing the Trots & Bonnie collection.

~ ds

* This strip is hard to write about and do justice to, and I could not do any better than Emily Flake’s truly excellent introduction to the T&B collection.

** I found it – it was Women’s Erotic Art Gallery, published in 1975.

*** Flenniken explains, ‘the things that I did that we omitted here in this book, I think we looked at those and went, “oh, that might hurt somebody’s feelings or something.” That was me being naïve when I wrote those. A lot of times I was just exploring a subject rather than having a definitive stance. People are pretty darn outrageous today, more so than me. What has changed is what people think is offensive.‘

Treasured Stories: “Why Can’t You Be More Like Marvin?” (1975)

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« The devil’s most devilish when respectable. » — Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Ah, the nineteen seventies… and their Satanic panic, in which we can recognize so closely the roots (or at least relatives) of today’s disinformation maelstrom, before the politicisation and weaponisation of septic paranoia and lies had become honed to such an anti-science. In a lot of sordid ways, Lawrence Pazder was an Andrew Wakefield of his day.

Here’s a story that I first encountered around the time of its release, remembered, but didn’t revisit until a couple of weeks ago, when a good friend (merci, Keith!) helpfully snapped up a copy for me. This deceptively dark tale was created by writer Arnold Drake (I surmise), penciller John Celardo and mysterious inker Wanda Ippolito, who may have a been a spouse or relative of Celardo’s. It’s odd to find someone else inking Celardo, as this was his chief, most enduring and distinctive strength. For comparison’s sake — and presumably, reading enjoyment — here’s another Drake-Celardo outing, The Anti-13!

I won’t make any claims that this is great art: by this time, Gold Key’s printing was shoddy, they barely bothered with the colouring (straight Magenta and Cyan and Yellow everywhere — how lazy can you get?)… but I treasure this one because of the story. Given its moral — what moral? — it’s hard to imagine The Comics Code Authority giving this one a pass, as it merrily violates several of its key precepts. I’ve got another such blasphemous entry in the pipeline… this one duly Code-Approved! Just you wait…

I had a childhood friend who was a lot like Marvin (minus the devil worship — for all I know)… he was incredibly talented, but also scarily unpredictable, and not in a good way. One day, he just disappeared.

On the other hand, the accompanying cover is spectacular.

« Why Can’t You Be More Like Marvin? » originally appeared in Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery no. 63 (Aug. 1975, Gold Key), which bore this masterfully disquieting cover by Luis Domínguez. It would have made it into my Domínguez retrospective, Luis Domínguez (1923-2020): A Farewell in Twelve Covers but for the fact that I didn’t own a decent copy of the issue.

And as (nearly) always, a bonus for context: Celardo had a long and fruitful career, and I’m sure one of its highlights was to number among Fiction House’s elite cadre of cover artists. I’ve said it before, but despite their mind-numbing repetitiveness, FH covers were tops in the Golden Age in terms of draftsmanship and production values.

Aw, poor Ka’a’nga — always left at home to feed the jackals while Ann Mason goes off on escapades with her other boyfriends. And who insisted on adopting them in the first place? Ann, that’s who! This is Jungle Comics no. 98 (Feb. 1948, Fiction House). Judging from his ability in the jungle antics genre, it’s no wonder that Celardo was picked to illustrate the real thing (at least comics-wise): the Tarzan comic strip, from 1954 to 1968, between Bob Lubbers (another FH cover artiste!) and Russ Manning.
And here’s one of Celardo’s Tarzan Sundays (March 27, 1954, United Feature Syndicate).

-RG

Sitting Pretty: Averardo Ciriello’s Maghella

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« Italy hasn’t had a government since Mussolini. » — Richard M. Nixon

Today, let’s bask in some purely visual glory. Let’s take a gander at a small corner of the mind-boggling œuvre of Averardo Ciriello (1918 – 2016). As you can see from these dates, he was a long-lived fellow, and I’m delighted to report that he was healthy, hearty and active well into his nineties.

He was one of those illustrators who truly delighted in their craft, and so produced an enormous body of work that bore every sign of inspiration and enthusiasm. Since my plan is to focus on a specific period of his career, I’ll skip most of his early work — though it’s well worth returning to — and give you a couple of famous pieces to give you as a sense of his success and importance in his field.

It’s fair to say that Ciriello excelled across the board, likenesses included. This is the Italian poster for 1956’s Forbidden Planet.
And this one for 1965’s Bond adventure Thunderball. Since the Bond movies were as much Italian as British production (if not moreso), it’s no surprise that producer Cubby Broccoli did not scrimp, tapping Ciriello for the series’ Italian promotional campaign.

Now for the heart of it: I frankly marvel at Ciriello’s willingness to provide hundreds of cover paintings for cheap, mass market erotica fumetti. The way I see it, it’s evidence that he greatly enjoyed the assignment, and that the money was but a secondary concern at best. We’ve briefly touched upon the Maghella series (in our all-time most popular post, as it happens), but here’s some more.

This is Maghella no. 1 (Nov. 1974, Elvifrance).
This is Maghella no. 15 (Oct. 1975, Elvifrance).
This is Maghella no. 22 (Mar. 1976, Elvifrance). ‘Gode’, aside from being a city in Ethiopia and a species of fish, is the abbreviation of godemichet, which is to say… a dildo.
This is Maghella no. 24 (Apr. 1976, Elvifrance).
This is Maghella no. 41 (Apr. 1977, Elvifrance). Since you’re bound to ask, here’s a recipe for Salade russe, which actual Russians call ‘Salade Olivier‘. DS made it for lunch a couple of days ago, and it was delicious.
This is Maghella no. 42 (May 1977, Elvifrance). Unlike most artists specialising in ‘erotica’, Ciriello could draw anything, in any style, and effortlessly mix sensuality with comedy with horror with angst. A true master — sorry, maestro.
This is Maghella no. 66 (Jan. 1979, Elvifrance).
This is Maghella no. 77 (Feb. 1980, Elvifrance). I assure you, those pun-based titles are utterly untranslatable.
Censorship inevitably got into the act. Here’s one of several instances, the before (with imposed editorial revision indicated) and after of Maghella no. 110 (Sept. 1978, Publistrip); said censorship seems to have driven up the cover price, to boot. This precious bit of info gleaned from a lovely monograph of the artist, Gianni Brunoro and Franco Giacomini’s Ciriello: Una Vita per l’illustratione (2016, Edizioni Di).

-RG

Pudge, Girl Blimp, Goes Cavorting

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« While so many other women underground cartoonists were reclaiming the right to their own bodies in the wake of Roe v. Wade with comics like Abortion Eve and Tits n’ Clits, Marrs was reclaiming hers by reveling in its grotesqueries—namely, burps, pimples, compleat dandruff, BO, flatulence, ‘and other bodily emissions’. »

My first exposure to underrated cartoonist Lee Marrs was the story A Feline Feast, which you can conveniently read in co-admin RG’s post Felines and Moonshine: Two by Lee Marrs. I liked the expressive sketchiness of her line straight away, but only got around to what’s arguably her magnum opus, The Further Fattening Adventures of Pudge, Girl Blimp, much later.

In a fairer world, Marrs would be a much better known name. Was is because her output was so wide-ranging, or because she was writing frankly about women as actual human beings, not some glorified version thereof? I think fame is largely down to luck, and I guess luck was not exactly au rendez-vous. Still, fame or no fame, it’s undeniable that her career has been long, varied, and, I imagine, satisfying. It has been summarized by Monica Johnson writing for The Rumpus, so if you want the nitty-gritty of it, head over here; I’ll just mention that she was one of the first female underground comics artists, as well as one of the ‘founding mommies’ of Wimmen’s Comix.

Wimmen’s Comix no. 3 (October 1973, Last Gasp). The ranks of Marrs’ fellow Wimmen’s Comix founders have been cruelly decimated of late: our respectful farewells to Diane Noomin (who died last Sept. 1st) and Aline Kominsky-Crumb (who died November 29th).

Comixjoint explains,

« Our squat, face-stuffing heroine Pudge is introduced with her hitchhiked arrival in San Francisco from Normal, Illinois as a fat 17-year-old runaway. She’s also a virgin and she really wants to get laid, but that won’t happen in the first issue (or the second). Pudge’s backstory is further complicated by the fact that she is, in reality, a Martian, and the government of Mars has sent two guardian Martians to Earth in order to keep an eye on her… »

The Further Fattening Adventures of Pudge, Girl Blimp no. 1 was published by Last Gasp in 1973 and then reprinted, with a new cover, by Star*Reach, which also released issues no. 2 and 3. This is no. 3 from October, 1977.

I wasn’t setting out to write yet another post about an ‘historically important’ series; these things are accidental. The following scans are from a 2016 collection, The Further Fattening Adventures of Pudge, Girl Blimp, which almost looks like a print-on-demand affair, the art reproduced a tad shoddily and fuzzily. Where is the lavish hard-cover edition with bonus material, I would like to know? Well, we’ll settle for this in the meantime.

A little peek into the commune where Pudge lives, as well as a glimpse at one of the many parties (an occasion to find some guy to have sex with, hopefully).

Here is a four-page sequence that I chose not only because it involves a cat (though I admit that influenced me), but mostly because it shows the nice dynamics of the close-knit group of ‘perverted hippies’ Pudge lives with:

Finally, a look at one of Pudge’s many attempts to hold a job:

The lovely thing about this series is that it never comes off as cringy, despite all the plot traps this comic could have fallen into. Pudge is not some sort of idealized, sexy Voluptuous Woman, and neither is she a butt of fat jokes. Her girth is a facet of her, along with her personality, curls, and puppy enthusiasm for some things – some people love her, some people don’t, and that’s fine. When she loses weight, her beau bemoans ‘sigh… I’m gonna miss all those yards of bouncy flesh…’ but he is not fetishizing her. Besides adroitly handling what’s arguably a taboo topic (although a lot more today than it was in the 70s, I imagine), Marrs also lovingly depicts a totally believable camaraderie between a rather disparate group of people of all races and interests; addresses sex in a playful and positive yet realistic way; and even delivers a sort of a public service message, as we follow Pudge while she gets a crash course in contraception, is instructed on how to find her cervix, and compares breasts with friends. She may occasionally end up in jail or suffer disappointments as she discovers that life is more complicated than she thought… but in the end, this is a friendly and welcoming world to spend some time in.

I’ll leave you with this Moebius parody, published in Imagine no. 3 (August 1978, Star*Reach):

~ ds

Hallowe’en Countdown VI, Day 27

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« Now these men have no need for words… they know! » — Anonymous

Now I won’t claim that Dick Ayers (1924-2014) was all that great an artist. In the early Sixties at Marvel, as an inker of Jack Kirby’s pencils, he was at best neutral, more likely than not to defuse much of the explosive excitement of the King’s pencils*.

However, Ayers’ chief strengths lay elsewhere: it was demonstrated time and time again that he could quickly put together dynamic and easy to parse — don’t laugh, it’s no cakewalk — layouts, and if you paired him with a dominant inker (such as John Severin (on Sgt. Fury) Alfredo Alcala (on Kamandi), Jack Abel (on Freedom Fighters) or Gerry Talaoc (on The Unknown Soldier), you’d get some quite presentable results — and quickly at that. Guys like Ayers should be saluted instead of dismissed, because they were the glue that held the funnybook business together and operating more or less smoothly.

I won’t claim either that Eerie Pubs’ product was anything but shoddy, shlocky goods, but I won’t deny that it can be fascinating… in small doses. While still working for Marvel, Ayers produced a memorable bunch of stories for a pair of former Timely/Atlas colleagues, publisher Myron Fass and editor Carl Burgos (creator of the Golden Age Human Torch). This is Ayers’ first published effort for those rascals. It appeared in Horror Tales v.2 no. 1 (Jan. 1970, Eerie Pubs). Brace yourselves!

«… Dick Ayers understood what ‘Carl and Myron’ were asking for and gave it to them in spades. They wanted gore? They got it! Ripped-off limbs, lolling tongues, gouts of blood and oh my… those popping eyes! Ayers’ trademark was the eye-poppin’. Socket just couldn’t contain ’em! » — from Mike Howlett‘s definitive study The Weird World of Eerie Publications (2010, Feral House).

« House of Monsters » is a Grand Guignol remake of « The Castle of Fear », from Weird Mysteries no. 3 (Feb. 1953, Stanley Morse). Read it here! Myron Fass held the rights to a lot of old inventory, so he had the old stories touched up or redrawn, some of them multiple times. Grotesqueness aside, I do prefer the original version. It had a better monster and a stronger ending… but you be the judge!

I came across this saucy bit of Ayers carnage in 1976, in one of the first Eerie Pubs mags to surface following a hiatus imposed by a severe contraction of the black and white horror mag market (thanks, Marvel). At the time, it just seemed like the oddest item: at once something of another, earlier time (it was an all-reprint affair), but also extremely garish in its goriness, even by slack contemporary standards.

Here’s my beat-up original copy of Weird vol. 9 no. 3 (Sept 1976, Eerie Pubs). Cover by Bill Alexander. I didn’t realise at the time that it was a bit of an Eerie’s Greatest Hits collection, so every other Eerie mag subsequently encountered rather paled in comparison.

-RG

*But then, with the splendid exception of Steve Ditko (and that was a waste of precious resources), I’d argue that virtually all of the inkers he was saddled… er, paired with before Joe Sinnott were rather underwhelming.