Monday, August 20, 2018

Number 2222: Bill Everett brings murder under the big top

“The Great Felix,” drawn by Bill Everett, is a superb example of how Everett could tell a story. It also shows how good his drawing was. Some other artists might have tried to cheat to save time and need for reference by not showing as much of the circus or its atmosphere, but Everett didn’t cut corners or fake it.

Felix is described as “ugly and short” and his beautiful wife is tall, blonde and beautiful. And when an ugly guy has a beautiful wife you know which way the story is going to go. Jealousy has one solution in a horror comic: murder.

Rival publisher EC Comics used this type of story more than once. Their resident circus and carnival artist was Graham “Ghastly” Ingels. Go down the page to the link with scans of the original art for such a tale.

“The Great Felix” appeared in Atlas’ Suspense #6 (1951).









A noirish circus story of sex and adultery by Ghastly Ingels. Just click on the thumbnail.


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2 comments:

  1. Brian Barnes7:37 AM

    I ending was pretty bad, but the art was gorgeous. There wasn't anything Everett couldn't do. Atlas had an incredible line up of artists, lead by Everett, with Joe Maneely right up behind him.

    The cats looked like cats, all the background elements, our protagonist and wife were drawn great, just a great job all around, but kind of collapsed with the nonsense ending. Which is kind of weird, normally Atlas was a lot better at that kind of stuff.

    This is a story (and something that would happen at EC a bunch) where the art completely made up for any problems in the writing.

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  2. Charlie Horse 4711:06 AM

    Don’t know why but I get a sense of “Quality Comics “ company with Bill’s art?

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