Number 360
Sing along with Syr-Darya!
Here's a story from Web Of Mystery #13 (1952), with a kinky comic book panel, shown above. A guy getting whipped and a girl yelling, "Dog! Take that!" gets my attention. It is drawn by Lin Streeter.
Great stuff, and I love the coloring on this story.
8 comments:
Some girls get rough, and splendid in so doing, eh paps...
Yep, dig this, yet another example of the 'frond'-line style of inking you see in Kurtzman, Early Kubert and Krigstein, the latter and Kurtzman distinguishing themselves in the mode by inflecting and elaborating the lines consistent with this style.
Rudy, as many years as I've been studying and reading comics I've never heard of "frond-line style," an entirely new term to me. I hope you'll elaborate. I'm not sure what to look for that distinguishes this style.
I somehow managed to miss this story yesterday, Pappy, but I ain't complaining because it was just as welcome today.
Weird, it's like an ACG story in an ACE comicbook... feels a bit like Lin Streeter's clean style to me. Very cool.
I'm coining new terms here, paps, to attempt to express stylistic affinities which, apparently, only I have an eye for, (or then no eyes at all). So, it surely won't be recognized in whatever passes for the official literature of comicdom.
It seems to be stock and trade inking apparent from the late 40's and into the early fifties. Lines are want to begin at a point, and expand fairly quickly into a bold Width and return, with nearly the same rate of reduction to a point. One feels the presense of the brush. The economy is tight, as in this story, as compared with say, an Eisner daily from '48. The lines are limited, gestural, implying in an almost cruddy nouveau fashion the contours of a face or sleeve. No ben-day, no kraftint, no zip-tone. Kurtzman pushes his toward a sort of Modernist wood-block printing style, and Krigstien moves toward the arabesque. Which is why both were ultimately unappreciated back in the day, by and large, as compared to the populist flare of a Jack Davis, or a solid comicbook stiff like Kamen. If Eisner and Wood are classical, then Kurtzman (when they let him do finish-work) and Krigstien are Romantics.
Yes, this is Lin Streeter's work, and one of his best, painstakingly rendered.
Y'know, I thought stories like these had long lost their ability to actually scare or horrify me. I love them for what they are, but I miss the sense of the "creeps" that they would sometimes give me as a kid. Then I got to page four, frame three of this story and, yes, I shuddered (the eyes plus the predatory smile did it). It was like being ten again.
I love your site and probably spend far too much time here, Pappy, diligently working my way through the posts (in reverse order, because I'm contrary like that). I'd like to thank you very much indeed for sharing. I shall treasure that shudder as a message from the younger me, even if the text of the message was essentially, "Oh! Ewww!"
Carreaux, you just took me back in time three years, when I first posted this. I haven't read it since, and so I looked at it with a fresh outlook.
Great stuff! And I agree about the panel that creeped you. Sometimes it isn't the grossest or goriest... sometimes the scares are just in a look.
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