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Friday, January 04, 2019

Number 2282: Two from Uncanny Tales

Jack Keller was a longtime comic book journeyman, working in a variety of genres. He was definitely able to tell a story, and my opinion was also helped by seeing some of his Kid Colt western stories for Atlas/Marvel. I would bet Keller was a very dependable artist who got his work in on time. An editor's dream.

For today I have picked a werewolf story by Keller; the Grand Comics Database credits Carl Wessler for the script.

Speaking of scripts, the late Stan Lee showed his funny side with this Joe Maneely-drawn shorty of a horror comics editor who can’t seem to find a decent story from writers. I have mentioned before I like self-referential stories about the inner workings of the comics business. I wonder if Joe Maneely caricatured himself bent over a drawing board (page 3, panel 2). Obviously he didn’t caricature Stan Lee, who was too tall and slim to be mistaken for the fat and angry editor, Bradbury Bulldozer.

Both stories are from Uncanny Tales #4 (1952).










7 comments:

Brad S. said...

Happy New Year, Pappy! Both stories had nice art, but the plots were rehashes of a hundred other stories. Makes you wonder how much longer horror comics would have lasted, even without SOTL; the writers were clearly running out of plots....

Brian Barnes said...

Don Perlin took over for Ploog on Werewolf By Night, not sure what you are thinking about with Keller unless there's something weird I don't know!

Man, vampires in horror comics do a LOT of work to find a victim!

Darci said...

It might have been worth getting married just to change her last name from Craven to Heath!

Wait a minute, "vampire Ella"...is that a first?
;-)

Henrique Brum said...

I recently found the blog searching for Walt Kelly, great stuff here...but I miss the lightbox when opening the pages. I thought it was standard on blogspot, when upload a img it's opens on lightbox, so we can use arrows to go through the pages. Here it opens the jpg on other window so we need to go back to site to open next page.

Richard said...

It's interesting two stories in the same issue would both feature essentially the same four panel werewolf transformation sequence. A little surprising that Lee as editor didn't spot the redundancy when selecting the stories to go in that issue.

If only Mark had paused to wonder why Ella's parents had a jail cell complete with iron gate so conveniently located in their basement...

Pappy said...

Henrique, I disabled the lightbox feature for my blog. I right click on each individual page with "open link in new tab" until all the pages are listed, then go back and read them in much the same fashion as the lightbox.

Thank you for your note.

Pappy said...

Brian, well, I'm red-faced here...it has been many years since I even looked at any of my issues of Werewolf by Night except for the Ploog issues, and some trick of memory caused me to put Keller in Perlin's place.

Thank you for your reminder that I must check my blog with a bit of routine research before posting. Consider it a lesson learned, and thanks!