Bulletman and Bulletgirl meet the Murderous Wizard...and what weapons are carried by said Wizard! He totes a lightning pistol
and an atom smasher! The atom smasher is very compact. It looks like a box with a camera lens and a Thomas Edison-style light bulb. The Wizard is also bizarre looking. Maybe he got too much radiation while working on that atom smasher.
The colorist for the whole Fawcett comic book has colored skin tones as orange. It reminds me of the spray tan color of the current occupant of the White House, and ’nuff said about that.
No artist or writer (or colorist) is listed by the Grand Comics Database. The story appeared in
Master Comics #36 (1943).
Setting aside the art and the script, this story wasn't bad at all.
ReplyDeleteEh. The orange faces may have been the work of a psychic foreseeing our current POTUS — or maybe POTUS saw this book and was inspired.
ReplyDeleteBut seriously, I wonder whether this was a coloring mistake or maybe a screw up by an engraver at the printers. Former using wrong coding, later using a full yellow screen instead of the pale yellow used (with pink) for Caucasian flesh. (Now that I think about it, I wonder whether Black people were colored in early Marvels as grayish not by mistake per se as opposed as being afraid that if they were colored accurately, Southern outlets would dump the books for being integrated.)
Daniel, as always, I aim to please!
ReplyDeleteManqueman, interesting conjecture about the coloring of black people (admittedly, my memory may be lacking due to the amount of years from here back to there). But during my time reading those early Marvel Comics I don't really remember any black characters except for occasional Africans in fantasy or jungle stories, and then when they introduced a black character in Sgt Fury and his Howling Commandos. That was when I saw a comment in the letter page from an African-American reader who said that blacks were shown as having an unrealistic ashen color.
ReplyDeleteI am interested in your comment about the coloring in the Bulletman story and it seems as reasonable as any I could think of. I think having it a screw-up seems very probable, and in those days with production and deadlines and having to book press time in advance sometimes they wouldn't have time to correct mistakes before the book was printed.