There has been, for many years, a big debate on how much Stan Lee contributed to the early Marvel output versus Jack Kirby. Some say Lee did the bulk of the work and Jack was just a hired hand to illustrate Lee's vision; others think Kirby did everything and Lee was nothing more than a glorified proofreader. The truth likely lies in between somewhere, although it is pretty readily accepted by everyone that Kirby did all the artwork and design. Except when he didn't. One of the pages of original art that has survived is page 16 from Fantastic Four #3. The Thing and the Human Torch get into a fight, and the Torch leaves. More interestingly, though, we have on the back of the art board several sketches for a chest emblem. The was the issue where the FF debuted their team uniform and it would appear that there was some discussion about what the chest emblem should be. And what we can see with this page in particular was that Kirby was not the only one making illustrative contributions to the book. The logo sketches were most likely Lee's work. Some of the other earlier FF pages indeed have rough (i.e. really bad stick figures) "layouts" that are Lee scribbled to help describe what he was envisioning to Kirby. It's possible that someone besides Lee could have done these emblem sketches, but A) it almost certainly wasn't Kirby -- those bear no resemblance to his style of sketching -- and B) not many other people would've had access to the original art.

Now, the other possibility for the logos could be Sol Brodsky. He appears to have done some elaborate re-work on the Human Torch figures throughout that issue, including on that page (at right, circled in red) to bring him more in line with the original Carl Burgos design. So Brodsky would have had access to the art boards, and he did create the "Fantastic Four" logo that shows up on the cover. That said, I'm inclined to say it was still Lee as Brodsky had a fair degree of artisic skill and most of the designs seem to have been drawn by someone with an unsure hand.

But then there's the question of the sketches showing up on page 16 instead of 7, when the costume first appears. That doesn't strike me as particularly odd. Kirby wouldn't have only turned in one or two pages at a time, he turned the art for an entire story at once. So when Lee (or Brodsky) opted to doodle some new logo ideas, he could've grabbed any page from the story at random. Brodsky, already going through the pages to re-work the Torch, would have also been able make other adjustments to the characters' costumes as the same time.

In Pure Images #2, Greg Theakston goes back to the original art and inked some of the pages onto new boards using some of Jack's original pencil lines. Jack's original FF logo was an interlocking "FF" similar to one of the middle ones on the far right of that page. (Circled in red at the left. The final is circled in blue.) Further, the costumes included masks for everyone, hence that really weird close-up on Sue's face when she first steps out in the new costume. (See below.) All that would have been "fixed" by Brodsky along with those Human Torch figures.
The extruded "4" design was eventually simplified to a more flat figure -- probably because Kirby simply forgot about the drop shadow effect somewhere around issue #16. He never rendered it consistently anyway. Had Joe Sinnott been on the book by this point, he may have added it back in for consistency, but the book still had a more-or-less rotating cast of inkers; Chic Stone is the first person to ink more than three consecutive issues starting with #29. The 3D effect on the "4" doesn't return consistently until John Byrne picked up the title many years later.

Several years back, I talked about a cereal produced by Ralston called Morning Funnies. It lasted all of about a year because 1) you could read all of the funnies on the box on the first day and you were stuck with the same comics for the next several weeks until you finished the box, and 2) it didn't taste all that great to begin with. It turns out that Ralston could have learned that lesson much more cheaply if they'd looked back a couple decades to the Flavors Valley Corporation, who produced a short-lived series of Sunday Funnies Colas.

I only just heard of these myself over the weekend, but as near as I can tell, it was almost literally the exact same idea but with soda instead of cereal. In 1969, Flavors Valley came out with this line of canned soda in a variety of fairly standard flavors featuring a King Features comic strip character on the front and a comic strip about them on the back. The photos I've found suggest there were five flavors (cola, orange, grape, root beer and "red pop") and four comic strips represented (Popeye, Hagar the Horrible, Beetle Bailey, and Blondie). I've found as many as seven different individual Hagar strips represented and six Blondie ones. However, many of the sites displaying examples show clearly different cans using the same strips, so I suspect there might only be seven strips used for each title. While most feature stand-alone gags, the Popeye strips seem to be sequential and part of a broader story. There doesn't seem to be any correlation between the flavors and the comics, so presumably there are 140 variations. (Five flavors times four comics times seven individual strips.)

There seems to be frightfully little information online -- I've basically told you everything I could find already, and most of that I had to find by just studying the various photos of the cans that came up. Since every one seems to be dated 1969, I suspect these only remained in circulation for about a year, but I don't know if that's because the sodas themselves didn't sell or the company folded or what. I can't seem to find any additional information on "Flavors Valley Corporation" so I don't even know if they produced more than this one product. But I still find it fascinating that it's almost the exact same idea that Ralston tried two decades later with pretty much exactly the same level of success.

So, for any potential venture capitalists reading this: don't try to hang your food product sales on delivering King Features comic strips on your packaging.

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

Kleefeld on Comics: Two-Fisted Tales: Luck
https://ift.tt/3coBpRJ

Kleefeld on Comics: Abie the Agent
https://ift.tt/3wQ0LzI

Kleefeld on Comics: Trailing Billy Keane
https://ift.tt/3g29Tuf

Kleefeld on Comics: The Shield #1 Review
https://ift.tt/3pj5Xtd

Kleefeld on Comics: The Sinking of the Lusitania
https://ift.tt/3gdzXTj

Winsor McCay is of course best known for Little Nemo in Slumberland. But he did less famous comics like Dream of the Rarebit Fiend and Little Sammy Sneeze. He also did some early work in animation, and his Gertie the Dinosaur cartoon is pretty well known, as is his animated attempt at Little Nemo.

Less well known today was his "documentary" on the sinking of the Lusitania. The ship was blasted in 1915 by a German submarine, and it helped propel the United States to enter World War I. The sinking outraged McCay (and many other Americans) and he spent his free time developing this twelve minute film, often touted as the longest animated work at the time.

As no one who was on hand survived, McCay primarily relied on the account of August F. Beach, a reporter based in Berlin who worked for William Randolph Hearst. Beach was the first reporter to get on the original story. The film is pretty clearly a propaganda piece but it's starkness was highly unusual for animation (it was still considered very much a medium of, at best, brief diversion) and McCay's abilities were so far beyond his contemporaries that no one could attempt anything comparable for years afterwards.

The film took nearly two years to complete, with McCay painting the majority of the cells himself. Unlike his previous forays into animation, however, The Sinking of the Lusitania did poorly at the box office. But even coupled with Hearst's less than subtle attempts to force McCay into doing comic strips exclusively, McCay went on to produce six more films by 1921. Lusitania seems to me as one of his more personal and heartfelt films, though.

Take a look for yourself...

Let me start by getting everyone caught up on some of the real life backstory on this comic. Archie Comics decided to relaunch their superhero properties and hired Rob Liefeld to write and draw the kickoff issue: The Mighty Crusaders: The Shield. I believe this was originally announced back in December. In May, Tone Rodriguez posted a variant cover he did for the issue, and Liefeld complained that the image spoiled the big twist of the story so he quit, not having actually scripted the issue yet. (Or, at least, not having turned a script in!) I'm not sure what Liefeld felt was spoiled since the new character depicted on the Rodriguez variant was shown very clearly in the hype material dating back to mid-December! Regardless, Liefeld quit without having finished the issue and so Archie Comics pulled in writer David Gallaher to make sense of the art Liefeld had already turned in, and to turn it into an actual scripted comic. Gallaher's involvement was announced in the last week of May. The final order cutoff is on June 7, with the issue itself due out in stores June 30.

I happened to get a hold of a digital preview of the comic and, given that the FOC is in less than a week, I thought folks might be curious to see what the story is actually about before then. Don't worry, though! I'll avoid spoilers, since that apparently caused some problems before! 😄

Normally, with the kind of shitshow backstory the making of this comic has, I would expect a hot mess. Bringing in a new writer at the last minute to craft a story around existing art without any guidance from the original storyteller is always going to be a challenge, and whatever you think of his illustration style, his actual storytelling abilities are not great. I've seen other comics where a new writer was brought in to try to recover a project (which may have gone sideways for any number of reasons) and the lack of synergy is usually pretty apparent. One of the classic examples is Fantastic Four #108, which Jack Kirby wrote and drew, but Stan Lee reworked it considerably with the help of John Romita, Sr. after Kirby had left Marvel. The result is a passable story, but it's more than a little clunky in places. Here, though, things turned out surprisingly smooth!

I have no idea what kind of tale Liefeld had originally planned for this, but what we get is an organization called the Burning Hand trying to get their hands on the Shield armor, while The Mighty Crusaders discover that an alternate version of the Shield is "tripping through history" and about to cause a major temporal catastrophe, which they want to avoid at pretty much any cost. The Shield himself seems largely ignorant of what's going on and is trying to get some answers for himself, but not surprisingly for a superhero conflict this results in a bit of a physical altercation. We get a fair amount of action, with the Shield's inner monologue filling readers in on the any necessary context. I've never been overly familiar with Archie's superhero line, but everything needed to get up to speed is in this issue. Oh, and the character that Liefeld felt spoiled the big twist of the issue? He's identified as the alternative timeline version of the Shield on page 1.

Liefeld's style actually works to the final story's benefit here. Because the backgrounds are pretty sparse, and the panel-to-panel transitions often aren't clearly defined, that's allowed Gallaher the flexibility to craft a story that's not working at obvious cross purposes to the art. Unlike many other instances of a new writer being brought, like I mentioned above, I think this is one of the more successful instances I've come across. (Unless, of course, there have been some that we SO successful as to have been completely seemless. That probably has happened before, but I'm not aware of it.) If you like Liefeld's art, there's plenty of that here, with lots of pages of the Shield fighting Burning Hand agents. But Gallaher has crafted an actual story on top of that, and the two work together pretty well. Especially considering the backstory that got us all here!

I believe Archie had planned this round of their superhero books to be a series of one-shots focusing on individual characters. I don't know if they're still planning that, or if they've soured on the project after the problems getting this issue finished, but The Mighty Crusaders: The Shield certainly strikes me as a surprisingly promising start if they want it to be.

One of the reasons I like looking at original art is to see more of the process that creators put into their work. How did they go about actually creating the page? How did they achieve certain effects? I find it gives me a better insight into both their specific methods, but also comics production in general.

Here's an interesting example: a 1978 Sunday Family Circus from Bil Keane featuring the oft-copied/parodied dotted line showing Billy's path as he runs through the neighborhood.

What I find interesting here is how Keane actually drew that dotted line. My assumption had always been that he inked a solid black line, and then went in with some white paint to create the spaces between the dashes. That would strike me as the easiest way to have done these. But let's take a look at what Keane actually did...

You can just barely make out the pencil marks in a few places that show he did indeed sketch things in as a "solid" line. Two parallel pencil lines snaking throughout the piece. He's then gone in with a brush to ink between those two pencil lines to make a single, solid black line. In a few places here, you can see how the ink of his brush flows from one trapezoid to the next. And then there are stripes of white paint cutting through the line to create the dotted effect, as I guessed. But it's very high quality white that, over three decades later, still retains its pristine color and hasn't even begun chipping away.

All of which says what? Well, first, that Keane was no idiot. He knew how to create that dotted line effect efficiently. And, although I didn't touch on it much here, there's some subtlties in the execution of it, too, that make it a lot more readable than it might've been. That's probably why so many people remember the motif -- because Keane always did an excellent job of communicating the line even as it weaves in and out of other lines on the page. The reader never has to question where it goes. In large part because Keane spent some amount of time on the details of the line itself.

The other thing this says is that Keane used some really high quality materials on his work. Granted, he'd been doing the strip for nearly twenty years at this point, so we're not talking about a fresh-faced kid but a middle-aged adult who'd already made a successful career for himself, and could afford quality materials. He was a professional, and treated his work very much as a professional would.

I'm still not a big fan of Keane's style of humor, or his occasional heavy-handed religious iconography, but the man was unquestionably talented in his illustration and studying an original of his for the first time does give me a greater appreciation of his work.

One thing you don't see much any more is how comic strips could influence American culture. Obviously the newspaper used to be a much more prominent part of shaping perceptions; before the advent of television, newspaper were really the only way to communicate anything visually to a mass audience. You'll occasionally run across stories about how Sadie Hawkins Day came out of Li'l Abner or how the Jeep was probably named after the character in the Popeye comics. One that I hadn't seen before is how Harry Hershfield's Abie the Agent was used to fight Jewish stereotypes.

In 1910, Hershfield started a strip called Desperate Desomnd, a parody of adventure melodramas in a similar vein as Milt Gross' He Done Her Wrong from two decades later. He incorporated a Yiddish-speaking character into the strip, which proved a positive move and Hershfield's editor encouraged him to start a new strip focusing on the Jewish experience in America. Thus, Abie the Agent was born.

Abraham Kabibble* was a car salesman and, while he and the other Jewish characters depicted used some strong elements of Jewish culture to emphasize their roots, Hershfield was careful to avoid using those elements as part of the humor itself. For example...

Abie is clearly speaking a forced dialect, and the two characters have decidedly Jewish-sounding names, but there's no demeaning of the characters because of that. Hershfield is relying on some stereotypes, but not as the focus of the humor itself. He's basically using the strip to showcase that Jewish Americans are pretty much just like other Americans and weren't deserving of the broad slander that was often cast against them at the time. This was further emphasized in 1917 when Abie enlisted in the US Army to fight during World War I.

Clearly, Abie the Agent didn't change the hearts and minds of everybody overnight, and there would still be anti-Jewish sentiment in some circles for years. But being popular enough to have several strip collections made, two animated cartoons, and a reference in the Marx Brothers classic Animal Crackers suggest that it did help many Americans begin to accept and understand Jews as people just like them.

Kind of a pity that newspapers don't have that same pull today; maybe we could get a new version called Abhed the Agent. Or An-shi the Agent.

* As far as I can tell, this is the first instance of "Kabbible" being used as a Jewish name. Merwyn Bogue wouldn't adopt his "Ish Kabbible" stage name for several more years. There was a 1913 song titled "Isch ga-bibble" which Bogue later claimed to have gotten the name from. Whether Hershfield also got the name from the same song is unknown, but it would seem likely as "kabbible" is not a word itself and the song only debuted the year before Abie the Agent.