THOIA's "War with the Vampires" theme this month finally winds down, but we still have one more batty battle left to wage! And while the nazi bat-winged jerks of today's tale aren't exactly "vampires", they sure do a great job of suckin' at everything anyway! This is a super fun dose of the 'ol weird war tale, via the pummelin' fists of Commander Steel (of the International Police Service) and the April 1946 issue of Grand Slam Comics #52. Featuring some really awesome, though unfortunately uncredited artwork, and similar to our previous entry, it's a lengthy one, but still super fast paced... not to mention, these green robed klan kooks filling the sky with their sinister silhouettes make for some magically macabre moments. And make sure you check out that hilarious contest ad at the bottom, where to enter, all you have to do is destroy your comic book collection, haha... see you all in October for you know what.
Another fun 40s superhero comic. Bad guy does all the things you should be taught not to do in bad guy school 101. Instantly tells our hero how their gadget works and not checking the body after your death trap!
ReplyDeleteI like steel though his powers seem a bit undefined; he has good vitality? Can come back after injury? Incredible luck that the bad guy ran out of bullets?
The art is GREAT. The fighting is awesome, there's a real sense of movement, the coloring is good, lots of great backgrounds. A real fine job. Whoever it is, they either were aping Beck a bit or were told to because it has that Shazam look to it. It's a beautiful job for the 40s and could easily be a 60s superhero job.
Page 7 is especially awesome. The very comic gang pile on, the really impactful "thud" ... again, great job on the art.
In a few panels Commander Steele looks like the identical twin of Captain Marvel. I guess there were only so man ways to draw the face of a superhero.
ReplyDeleteIn a few years time the bat winged menaces would be from either the Soviet Union or Communist China instead of Germany, a hero needs somebody to fight and defeat.
Neat fact - Otto Lilienthal was the first man to fly a glider in the 1890's. His glider was the ancestor of the hang glider and inspired heavier than air flight.
The art to me feels like a wild mix influence of Wolverton, (Beck of course) and even Matt Fox. Commander definitely has The Hulk’s mug at times though too!
ReplyDeleteI kind of wish there was more Beck influence. Yeah, Steele's face might have actually been drawn by the man, but otherwise this art lacks a lot of that effortlessly nifty cleanliness that C.C. delivered in spades. Not that I feel like the illustrating here falters all that much, but there are definitely times where the haphazard shading begins to clot up with the age and thrifty printing practices. Beck's never woulda.
ReplyDeleteI really love the splash and the second panel of page five--and literally every other time the flying Nazis shapes multiply in the sky in some abstract visual jumble of yellow triangles and green klan outfits. It's got that jazzy sense of polygon-driven elan I associate with Sheldon Moldoff. And also it reminds me of tortilla chips with cheese and guacamole.
My favorite panel is in the middle of page 8, where they’re all lined up on the left half of the image, while the right half of the panel perspectively mimics them as pine tree silhouettes under a full moon.
ReplyDeletePS, that contest ad: Ugh, it's so terrible to see all the ways they urged kids to destroy their comics back in the day. Even in the seventies we had to cut out pages and send 'em in for fan clubs and magic rocks and stuff. But this one is the worst. I mean, four years earlier and all the kids would have been patriotically pulping their mags after reading them, for the war effort; but by forty-six kids should have been keeping that stuff. It's a wonder anything at all survived to be blogged, frankly.
ReplyDeleteI should also note that whenever I go walking in the neighborhoods here on trash day, I see those 800-page newsprint manga zasshi laying in stacks on the recycling cages. I think they have been laid aside so that other people can pick them up if they want (and I have), but if they are still laying there when the recycling is collected, they are toast. They are also toast if it rains. Nobody cares. They are considered disposable because they are cheap, and because nobody has the room to store more than ten of those bricks, anyway.
I was wondering if anyone checked out the ad. This same “tearing off the top half of the comic book cover” was equally practiced by newsstands back in the day by returning the tops of unsold issues to the publishers so they could get credit on their next orders. I don’t know how many copies of old comics I have with the titles ripped away, but damaged books were definitely cheaper and allowed me to read stuff that I likely couldn’t afford even in poor but complete cover grade.
ReplyDeleteThere was a store that sold comics near me when I was pretty young that would still sell the comics after ripping off the covers, you could get a whole bunch of them for the price of one!
DeleteSame. I had a huge run of 60’s House of Secrets with the cover titles removed, they must’ve all originally come from the same defunct newsstand the way they were bundled together in consecutive chunks
ReplyDelete