Number 630
Comics McCormick and Marvel Maid
From Fat and Slat #2, 1947, here's another Comics McCormick short, featuring sexy Marvel Maid. M.M. looks, facially at least, to be patterned on Wonder Woman, whose adventures were published by Max Gaines. (See the previous Pappy posting.) At the time of this issue of Fat and Slat Gaines had sold his interest in that publishing company and was publishing the EC Comics line, which included educational and entertainment comics for young readers, like Fat and Slat.
Ed Wheelan, who created Fat and Slat, also created Comics* McCormick. In the 1920s he created the daily comic strip Minute Movies, a double-tiered comic strip with sprocket holes like strips of movie film. Wheelan never changed his art style and his art seems quaint, even for those longago days of 1947. I posted the first Comics McCormick strip here and an earlier Ed Wheelan story here.
*I refuse to do like Wheelan and use quotation marks around nicknames. It's old-fashioned and unnecessary. And it's irritating; almost as irritating as an asterisk leading to a footnote.
4 comments:
I first discovered Wheelan when he turned up in back-ups of a couple of those facsimile DC Treasuries of the seventies. The art is sort of a combination of Harold Gray and Segar and seems quite the influence on Sheldon Mayer.
Ed Wheelan was influential in his day, which was the 1920s and '30s, and young Sheldon Mayer (born in 1917, and went to work for Max Gaines in 1935) would have been aware of Wheelan. For sure he would have worked with him, because Gaines had Wheelan revive his Minute Movies strip for Flash Comics #1 through 59. At the time Wheelan drew Comics McCormick he was already close to 60, and I wonder how kids in 1947 related to his old-fashioned artwork. Max Gaines liked it, and he was the guy with the checkbook. Where I see some similarities in Shelly Mayer's early work, it's mostly that both he and Wheelan looked like they really had fun drawing, and it comes through in their artwork.
Re: Marvel Maid:
Hubba and HUBBA!!
I kind of like the simplicity, how it's all just a daydream, and at the end, that's it...no twist like it was real, and I like how the kid just admits honestly what happened to him, and Mom and granny don't go off like he's a bad kid or something...
when Marvel Maid changes into her costume, she's really just taking her clothes off...that's all...and running 'round in he black swimsuit...what a gal...
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