I think examining original comic art is fascinating. The comic stories themselves are great and enjoyable, but seeing the production process "in action" as it were provides the viewer with insights into the creative decision making process. To wit...

I came across a Heritage Auction Galleries auction some time back for page 1 from Whiz Comics #7 by C.C. Beck circa 1940. (For those of you playing along at home, this issue was reprinted in The Shazam! Archives volume 1.) There are plenty of cool things to take note of here.

Probably the most obvious is the header graphics of Captain Marvel, Billy and the logo. Clearly, that part was pasted in placed over the original board. That's not very surprising, given that many of the Captain Marvel stories started exactly that same way. They would have made photostats of the artwork in question and pasted it directly on the art board. More noteworthy, though -- and you'll have to head over to Heritage's sight to really see this in the hi-res version -- is that the photostatted art isn't actually very clean. It has some roughness to the lines that suggest that the photostat was taken from either a printed copy instead of the original artwork and/or it was enlarged considerably. I had always assumed that faults that I had seen like that in reprints were from poor reproduction, but I hadn't realized that it was poor reproduction from 60+ years ago and didn't have anything to do with current technological issues.

Also of note in that same header area is a horizontal cut that runs through the original art board. There's no obvious reason for it, but it's exact placement does suggest a theory. The artwork above the cut, with the exception of Billy's dialogue balloon, are photostats. The photostats are pasted down on top of the cut, meaning they were added after the cut was made. The cut happens to horizontally align just about with the most amount of paste up running from left to right. So the scenario I think this suggests is: Beck drew up the whole page. There was a decision made (by either Beck or his editor) to change Billy's opening dialogue. Rather than trying to paint out the whole word balloon and letter over it, the top of the page that included that dialogue was entirely removed. A new top portion was attached, using the new photostats to help hold it place, and a new dialogue balloon was drawn in. The Grand Comics Database suggests that this was lettered by Bill Parker, but the lettering in that first panel looks different enough to me to suggest that someone else may have done that one balloon.

Now, why do I think the editor wanted to make a change to the dialogue? Check out the far left side of the page beginning next to Captain Marvel's boot. (I've uploaded at close-up to the right.) There's a hand-written note in red. It's mostly ripped off now, but some letters are still visible, including the last three letters of the first word: ...ECK! The first letter looks like it could be a B but I have to admit to it being very hard to tell for certain. Given the sparsity with which Beck himself left margin notes on his own artwork, I'm led to believe this came from someone else and was sent back to Beck. Although I can't make out each and every word, what I can make out coupled with the art touch-ups shown (more on that in a second) suggest that this is a direction to Beck that all of the scenes on THIS PAGE need to take place at niGHT. While that doesn't really speak to the header portion of the page, it does point to art corrections being sent back to Beck before the art was used in production.

Art corrections. Beck's artwork is generally fairly clean. Even on this one page, you can tell that he doesn't make many corrections as he inked a page. And most of the ones here tend to be ensuring the integrity of line strips of white: Billy's antenna, the ship railing, etc. What also seems to show up here (compared to other Beck pages) are some touch-ups along the edges of large black areas. The sides of the ship in panel two and the crates in panel three. Also the gutter above panel four seems to have rather a lot of spillover. Now I could possibly just be reading a little too much into things, but I get the impression that much of these large black areas were added after the original linework was put down. There just seems to be less precision given to these large swaths of black than anything else. Admittedly, that could easily just be a stylistic difference but, combined with what I think I'm seeing in that editor's note, it makes me consider this differently.

The one whited-out area that I don't have a complete answer for is in panel three. The area around Billy's hand clearly shows that a deep shadow was being cast by Billy onto the crate and partially removed board. Beck then evidently decided that didn't work very well and painted over it white. Exactly why he made that change, though, I couldn't hazard a guess at the moment.

Two more things of interest, but not particularly striking. 1) there are notations throughout the art in red pencil marking up some of the color specs. (Billy's shirt is Red and his backback is Yellow.) 2) The blue pencil mark at the bottom noting the final page size to the printer. 1940 was still early enough in comic book printing that apparently someone felt the need to expressly note the page size on the art itself, and not rely on anything that might've been written up in the order specifications.

Anyway, that's what I find fascinating about this page. Anything that anyone else sees?

About a decade before Rube Goldberg became well-known for his crazy invention ideas, he developed a comic called Foolish Questions. It consisted of one person asking another a question to which there was a seemingly mind-boggingly obvious answer, and the second person answering in as absurd a manner possible. It was literally the prototype that Al Jaffe later used for his Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions.

Jaffe wasn't the only one who borrowed Goldberg's idea, though. Goldberg's first Foolish Questions comic appeared in late 1908, and 1909 saw more than a couple immitators like Raymond Ewer's Those Ridiculous Questions and Foolish Foolish Questions by "Sterling" (a house pen-name at World Color Printing).

Several years after the original strip ran it's course in early 1910, they were reprinted by the Wallie Dorr Co. in the form of a card game. Cards were printed up using Goldberg's art, but the dialogue balloons were removed. The answer was then typeset along the bottom, and the challenge was then to match your cards up against the questions that the dealer would read out. Goldberg contribued two new quick illustrations to the game (for the box cover and the card back) but most of the art was taken from existing material.

I've seen people peg the game's date everywhere from 1912 to 1919. While the earlier date seems most likely, Goldberg continued dropping the feature in some of his other cartoons for years, so the 1919 date is still pretty plausible. Further, the game was re-issued with some new graphics in 1924, so the concept still had some life, even if it wasn't being run as a primary feature any longer.

What I find interesting is not only that it's game based on a comic from a famous cartoonist, but it's the earliest such game I've seen that uses actual comic panels as part of the game play itself, as opposed to, say, a board game that simply uses graphics from the comics. There's very few games I've seen utilize comics to this extent (in fact, "5 Card Nancy" is the only other one I can think of offhand) and that it was conceived a century ago near the very birth of newspaper comics is fascinating.

Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...

Kleefeld on Comics: Dick Tracy vs Mayor LaGuardia
https://ift.tt/NYj3qL26k

Kleefeld on Comics: Who Is Allan Salisbury?
https://ift.tt/6Zd0qs9vJ

Kleefeld on Comics: Bring Back Isaiah Bradley
https://ift.tt/v0zsEWeb8

Kleefeld on Comics: Who Was Clarence Matthew Baker?
https://ift.tt/7oXKrO2RG

Kleefeld on Comics: The Original Comics Inking Guide?
https://ift.tt/tXqyeDa

If you've read much history on the early days of comic strips (and books) you'll soon discover that many of the famous artists of the medium were self-taught. They would look at other artists' works and try to copy them as best they could. But once comic strips started becoming popular, and were conceivably a career one could aspire to, there were entreprenuers who tried to take cash in on the idea. You might be familiar with the classic "Draw Tippy the Turtle" test as a gateway towards a mail-away instruction course. Charles Schulz was both a student and later an instructor at one such institution: Art Instruction, Inc.

While Art Instruction, Inc. was founded back in 1914, it was originally just a general illustration school. What I came across recently was this book from the 1930s: Comic Strip Magic Drawing Book. (There's no copyright information available, but the "No. 861" corresponds with other numbered books from the publisher from around that time.) From the box cover, it appears to be a how-to manual for drawing your own comic strips.

However, once you remove the lid and open the book, what you find is a series of four-panel comic strips already drawn and lettered. The first three panels of each strip are essentially complete and the fourth (much larger) panel is printed very lightly so that the reader can trace or ink of the existing lines to complete the strip.

Theoretically, I suppose, you could then color all the strips as well, but the publisher intent seems to focus on the finishing.

The quality of illustration isn't bad, but the storytelling and "jokes" are. In fact, of the pages I've seen (I don't own this) the "plots" all center around an animal discovering an object they would like to obtain, only to discover it's false or they've made a mistake. (The fox thinks a feater duster is a rooster's tail, for example.)

Regardless of the quality, this is the earliest instance I've ever seen of a commercial enterprise singling out inking as a separate and distinct discipline than penciling. The Eisner-Iger Shop -- which famously broke down the comic making process into the typical duties we see today -- opened in 1936, and since we don't have a firm date on this book, it's possible it did come out later, but that numbering implies the first half of the 1930s.

So this could be the first instruction book on comic inking?

The handsome-looking gentleman at the left is Clarence Matthew Baker -- commonly know as Matt Baker -- a comic book artist who died in 1959. He attended the Cooper Union School of Engineering, Art, and Design in New York and, in 1944, got himself a job as a background artist with the S.M. Iger Studio. His first published work was in Jumbo Comics #69.

Baker became well-known for his "good girl" art that was popular at the time. In fact, it was his incredible ability which allowed him to break the color barriers that were in place at the time. Baker became the regular artist on "Sky Girl", "Tiger Girl" and "Camilla, Queen of the Jungle Empire." In 1947, Iger asked Baker to redesign Phantom Lady and his more scantily clad version of the character, based off actress Linda Darnell, caught the attention of Fredric Wertham. The cover of Phantom Lady #17 was even highlighted in Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent.

Baker and one of the writers he worked with on Phantom Lady, Ruth Roche, began a newspaper strip in 1952 called Flamingo. That ran two years and was distributed by Iger’s Phoenix Features.

Baker is perhaps most famously remembered for illustrating in 1950 what is sometimes (erroneously, in my opinion) considered the first graphic novel: It Rhymes with Lust. (Though it was called a "picture novel" at the time. Also, for those who haven't read it, the 'rhymes with lust' referred to in the title is the main character: Rust Masson.) The book and the concept were conceived of by writer Arnold Drake and Leslie Waller, though the book was a poor seller at the time.

Through the later half of the 1950s, Baker worked for a variety of publishers including Quality, Dell, Harvey and Timely/Atlas/Marvel. Baker was a heavy smoker and died from a heart attack in 1959 at age 37. His last confirmed work was the "I Gave Up the Man I Love!" story published in My Own Romance #73.

Truth: Red, White & Black, if you haven't read it, is the story about how after Captain America was created -- and the doctor who had developed the serum that gave Cap his powers was killed -- the US government tried to replicate the experiment. But without the original doctor's notes, they had to go through a lot of trial and error. Trial and error for which Black men were used as guinea pigs. Hundreds of men were essentially murdered in the process. Even of the five that survived the experiments, four were killed to keep the whole operation quiet. It was basically a Marvel-ized version of the Tuskegee experiments.

At the time the issues first came out, there was some flack about how writer Robert Morales and artist Kyle Baker were using the character to slag the original Captain America. As the story rolled on, readers learned that was not the case at all. In an 2009 interview, Baker noted, “We got a lot of grief from the Captain America fans on that series until the fifth and sixth issues came out; when it turned out that we hadn’t tinkered with the continuity. Before that, everybody was very upset... Somewhere in the middle of the series, its revealed that Cap already existed, and we hadn’t tinkered with the timeline, and suddenly, the book is okay.”

Frankly, I thought the idea was brilliant. It highlighted the whitewashing that's almost ever-present in our society, and showed how much we (and by "we" I mean mostly white people) know about what really happened. How we're taught lies and half-truths for the sake of making our government look infallible. How America can do no wrong and we should always support it, no matter what. Truth uses the fiction of Isaiah Bradley to showcase just how little the government cared (and still cares) about the actual welfare of Black men.

Admittedly, I don't especially like Baker's art on this book, though. I've read Baker's work before, and liked it elsewhere. And with his work on Nat Turner, I can see why he might've been selected for this. But I don't think he was a good fit here for some reason. It's not bad work certainly, but I don't think he's well-suited for telling this particular story.

I am bothered, though, how little this story has been brought up since it was first published in 2003. The character has made a handful of cameos, but they were so insignificant that his official biography from Marvel makes no mention of anything outside what's presented in Truth. And he hasn't made any comic appearances at all, as far as I can tell, in over a decade. He's actually been given more attention in the Marvel Cinematic Universe than in the comics.

I think this is a real missed opportunity. The character, as he stands today, is as physically fit as Captain America; he's just got a form of dementia that's left his intellect all but gone. Within the context of Truth, he was imprisoned from 1942 until 1961, though, so that still leaves decades of possible stories before we see him again in 2003. In fact, since he was released in 1961, isn't there a story there about how he could have witnessed the events from Fantastic Four #1? (Yeah, that mucks with Marvel's sliding time-scale, but whatever.) Or how about teaming up with some of the heroes shown in Marvel: The Lost Generation? That was written before Truth and couldn't have incorporated Bradley at the time, but there's no reason some new stories can't include him now. (Well, no reason other than an apparent lack of editorial interest in doing any stories that rely on continuity.)

I think there's a lot more than can (and should!) be said with Bradley's character. Morales and Baker touched on some significant issues, of course, but there's so much more that the character could be used for. Christopher Priest suggested some in The Crew and Reginald Hudlin skirts over a short idea quickly in Black Panther, but with those stories told in a post-Truth continuity, there's not much they could do with him. But like I said, there are literally decades of back stories that could be told, many of which could help enlighten more white folks about the travesties of justice that have been heaped on Black America for generations. There is so much more to be told with this character!

Back in 2012, I mentioned picking up a piece of original Allan "Sols" Salisbury art extremely cheaply. Both Salisbury and the Fingers and Foes strip were largely unknown to me, and it looks like I did at least a cursory bit of information digging, but it occurs to me that I relayed almost none of that. So who is he?

Salisbury was born in Kyabram, Australia in 1949. After spending some time in advertising, he developed a pantomime strip called Lennie the Loser. As far as I can tell, it was never picked up but it did help him pick an agent, who suggested that a strip with dialogue might be an easier sell. That's when Salisbury came up with Fingers & Foes.

The strip did, in fact, get picked up by Publishers-Hall Syndicate; the first time an Australian comic strip was purchased by a US syndicate without having previously seen publication in Australia. The strip debuted on March 18, 1974 in several markets, including Chicago, Dallas, Philadelphia, Miami, Vancouver, and Winnipeg. However the strip was canceled after only a few months, largely due to cultural differences. The strip had regular depictions of crime and justice, and Salisbury's approach on many of their sub-topics were considered politically incorrect by 1974 US standards.

Salisbury, though, had developed another strip more-or-less simultaneously called The Old Timer. That one was not picked up in the US, but it did debut in April 1974 in Australia's Daily Telegraph. The strip featured a variety of decidedly Australian characters including Crazy Croc, The Kangaroo, and an aboriginal native called The Last Lost Tribesman, so it's no surprise that it didn't get much traction elsewhere.

In 1976, Salisbury added a character called Snake (an actual snake). He was given more and more of the spotlight to the point where the name of the strip itself was changed to Snake Tales in 1978. As the humor relied less and less on Australia-specific archetypes, it gained more international appeal, getting picked up in the US in 1982. Curiously, strips published in America seemed to be pulled from both contemporary and older material. My best guess as to why (since Salisbury was still creating new strips) is that syndicate editors swapped in older strips when they got a new one that they didn't feel would go over well with an American audience. As there's no real continuity to the strip, this wouldn't pose a problem.

While Salisbury continues working on the strip to this day, it was dropped in the States in 1987. He currently resides on the island of Tasmania, with his wife and three kids.