I’m behind this week and haven’t even started into my eBay pile but I really don’t want to fish the internet for splash images, I want to keep it homemade so I ventured down into my basement at home to see if I had any comics laying around, these were some of my finds.
The great Esad Ribic with a two-page splash from Loki #1, September 2004. I once bought Esad Ribic a drink, I think Thor here got a better reception. Apologies for the lighting on this one, I settled on the best of the 4 tries I took.
I love this little find, unmistakable Jack Kirby in In Love #2 from November 1954. I wasn’t sure at first but then the face on the girl behind the tree gave it away.
You could run a phycological profile based on what you find in people’s basements and I do seem to have a lot of romance comics down there! Check out Tony DeZuniga laying out the problem that is “My Father’s Wife”. Lots to talk about there but also lots to look at, soooo 1971, from Secret Hearts #152.
Man cannot live on love alone it turns out, thankfully I do have some other cool stuff downstairs like this killer splash from Charles Sultan I believe, it’s from New Dime Comics #30 which I’m sure is reprinted from an earlier Dynamic Comics. New Comics #30 would be 1946 I’m thinking, perhaps someone knows the exact date?
I couldn’t resist adding another Charles Sultan – please correct me if I am wrong, Sultan drew Yankee Doodle Jones in I think it was Yankee Comics. This splash is in a Bell Features Smasher Comics #7 from 1946.
Hey Walt..love that Jack Kirby piece….perhaps the first appearance of poison Ivy? 😀
https://tse2.mm.bing.net/th?id=OIP.IWAmGZ4b6XyiqC233f_L6QHaE0&pid=Api&P=0&w=277&h=181
As always some great splashes. Love the New Dime Comics splash.
Definitely some Frazetta channeled thru the Ribic… really nice! For me the pick of the day is the Sultan! Wow… if that had been part of. Hydra/Shield story…. my my!
Charles Sultan…another great Golden Age artist who deserves more praise, and coverage. Thanks for showing us these. I love his work like thi s for Chesler, but it’s getting hard to pick up a reasonable prices sinces it part of the more obscure Gold that is skyrocketing in value.
Sadly Sultan’s work ten years later was pretty pedestrian, and I can’t even identify it with any competence. But early on, this stuff was often as good as what Mac Raboy was doing. And was certainly in the Lou Fine, highly detailed style with great splashes like this, powerful layouts.
Whoa, Walter, New Dime Comics? That one threw me, since you neglected to mention it was a WECA title. I knew of Dime Comics, but “New” Dime?? So I looked it up in the Grand Comics Database…here’s a link if any of you want to see this little rarbie. With a totally incongruous cover for a reprint of Dynamic Man inside. GCD has no date for it either, just “1946?”.
https://www.comics.org/issue/552660/
About that Kirby In Love, look hard through the foilage and you can see the embracing couple have distinctive Kirby faces. I like those In Love issues, S&K were trying something different there, they kept making comics look more like books. And building on the romance stuff they’d already pioneered, they were continuing to put out innovative new titles, exploring new genres, right through the early 1950s. My Date (humor romance), Bullseye, Boy’s Ranch, Fighting American…
Nice DeZuniga also, wonderful zip-a-tone work or maybe that stippling is hand done, on the faces and figures in the “keyhole”. I’d keep that issue.
Bud, these are in the home pile so eBay won’t get them and I should have mentioned that the New Dime was a White, kind of a post White I think, I’m sure Ivan Kocmarek would be able to set us straight. The most distinct Kirby feature I seen in the couple are the hands.
I like this batch too guys, I’m going to have to visit the basement at least one more time for a future post.
You have some very cool stuff in the “home pile.” Those early Yankees and Dynamic and such from Chesler are often much better than Fox or Ace or even some DCs from the same early 1940s period. Not too many of them, but really great to find.
Chesler was a fan of comics; I have a number of Platinum Age books that he donated to a museum. They made up protective clamshell boxes on them. But then they were de-acquisitioned (I hope they weren’t stolen) and someone sold a bunch of them to my partner Jim Vadeboncoeur and I, when we were Bud Plant Illustrated books back in the 1990s. I ended up getting a fair number of them by default, there was not much interest among our customers. Buster Browns, Krazy Kat, Mutt and Jeff, stuff like that. sadly, not in great shape, but hey, price was right. And neat that they were Chesler’s own copies.
I have a fondness for the Cupples and Leon strip reprints circa 1930-34: Barney Google (one of the best titles), Tillie the Toiler, Harold Teen, The Gumps, Moon Mullins, Mickey Mouse, Bringing Up Father, etc. Not expensive books, except for the Mickeys. Forerunners to Famous Funnies.
We certainly all accumulate some oddball stuff given the years we put collections together.