Friday, September 15, 2017

I Kid You Not

Friday Comic Book Day.

Last week I showed twp stories from Timely/Atlas' Adventures Into Weird Worlds #13 and #15. Today and tomorrow I want to show you two short stories from the same issues. Both have an overworked inking style, that made me think the famous stilted inker Matthew Fox was involved. But then I remembered that John Romita had said in several interviews that for a short period in 1952/1953 Stan (or his uncle/publisher Martin Goodman) had fallen in love with the line heavy inking style he had tried on one of the war stories and insisted he'd use it for everything (which took him twice as much time). Maybe Stan asked others to work in that style as well. Here is a short story by John Romita in that style. The second one is by Myron Fass. I wondered if it could have been inked by Matthew Fox. Fass worked in a variety of styles and I suspect he did not always do his own inking. Still, it could be Fass himself putting in a little extra work at Stan's request. The first story is written and signed by Stan Lee. The Fass story has 'through' instead of 'thru' so it can't be (see the explanation last week). Both stories have an intro that was probably written by Stan. he started the practice late in 1952 and continued it into his mostly selfwritten run of Menace. These EC style introductions are one of the first instances of the Stan Lee persona coming though - or thru, if you like. Both stories are part of my 'coics can be fun' run of this month.


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