Something slightly different for our final March of the Mummies Monday, and we're going waaaay back to the March 1939 issue of Funny Picture Stories Volume 3 #2, from Centaur. It's a spooky old detective mystery full of fun, Saturday matinee serial thrills, and stiffly superb artwork by E. F. Webster, who also penned the script. GCD notes that aside from this foray into comics, Webster was also a fine arts painter, as well as a former federal agent. Maybe that explains the natural knack for weird mysteries, such as this.
Hope everyone enjoyed this month of macabre mummery!
5 comments:
I love how the niece and the policeman keep switching sides while strung up by their wrists.
Good catch, Bill, the artist got a little confused by the camera angle there.
So there's a lot to like about this art. Yes, it's amateurish in a lot of ways, but it also has a interesting look, as if this is a puppet play with paper dolls.
The artist wants to do see-through nighty but I think isn't sure how far they show go, so you get stuff like the bottom of page 4 where it goes from opaque to completely transparent.
I love the acid pool, which is kind of a B&W movie acid pool, I love how the guy can hypnotize just by pointing a finger, and how our detective just outright plugs the guy from a distance and drops him into the acid (as most old house mysteries go.)
I love the font at the beginning, that's pretty cool and advertisement level work.
BTW: Good job on the radio and the car. That's some fine work. You can tell the stuff the artist liked to draw.
This was a decent thriller, story wise. The art in this one, where the characters faces change very little through the story, it is similar to the way Fletcher Hanks drew faces, little to any change from panel to panel.
This was a great way to end March Mummy Madness, with a 1930's thriller.
How mysterious. Interested in the old fashioned look here--and the fact that every panel is numbered--I thought I would dig up more info about this thing. Sometimes that numbering, and the feeling that line widths are changing from panel to panel, might mean that this was initially a newspaper strip that has been sawed-up and and refitted to the comics format--a standard practice in early funny books. I still don't really know for sure, but I didn't find any evidence supporting that theory.
What I did find was a couple of places where internet historians dated T-Men, and the character of "T-Man" Turner, supposedly the original series front-man and forerunner to "Chick" Farrell and "Bull" Madden who feature in this story, to the first issue of Target Comics in February 1940. This story clearly predates that one, both in style and in time. And it's certainly not the first "Chick" Farrell story, either. Amazing Mystery Funnies volume 2 issue 3 (Nov. 1938) has one in which he's just a normal police detective--no T-Men in sight. I stopped looking before I found more.
Also: GCD notes E.F. Webster was born Ethel Louise Felder in 1886. I assume Webster is a married name. Sometimes she signed her name as "Ed". Oddly, she is not named in Wikipedia's lengthy List of Female Comics Creators. One more mystery!
I agree that she is just exceptional at hand-lettering these titles. I've seen a few now, and they are all this good. I like the regular art too. Especially the neatly-wrapped mummies. I love the panel on page three where the imposter mummy steals into Miss Stone's bedroom. The green bandages rhyme perfectly with the folds of the red and blue curtains. It's like a Argento movie.
Thanks for this! Can't wait to see what happens in April.
Ethel Louise! Okay thanks for pointing that out— a rather important detail I somehow overlooked :)
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