We’re in day three of our “Boyoboy! Week,” where we’re celebrating those kid-gang comic book heroes of the past. Today, the Boy Commandos, created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby after they slipped the tether at Timely Comics, then moved to DC. The Boy Commandos were created as a wartime group but lasted until 1949. While they were popular they had their own title, and appeared also in
Detective Comics and
World’s Finest Comics.
Even during their wartime days the stories occasionally slipped into fantasy and science fiction, and so it is with “The Triumph of William Tell” from
Boy Commandos #30 (1948). The Grand Comics Database credits the penciling to John Severin and the inking to George Klein? (Question mark means they’re not sure.)
That's a pretty good copying of the S & K style. Missing a little bit of the bombasticity but has the texture and inking style down pat.
ReplyDeleteCash, if the pencil art is indeed by John Severin (and I see evidence of it here and there within the panels) then I can't imagine a more unlikely artist to simulate Kirby's style. Severin's style, good as it was, just didn't have the exaggeration of Kirby's.
ReplyDeleteI remember Don Thompson's essay on the kid gangs, "All On One and One On All," in "All In Color for a Dime," in which he wrote that the boys Kirby drew (in the Newsboy Legion and Boy Commandos) looked more like "older men with glandular disturbances" than kids.
ReplyDeleteKirby later came up with the western "Boy's Ranch," and his last kid gang was perhaps the "Dingbats of Danger Street" in the '70s.