Number 1963: Halloween eye-candy from Reed Crandall and Neal Adams

Next Monday is Halloween. I need to go to the store for some treats for the trick-or-treaters. I can’t give you a miniature candy bar online, so this week you will have to settle for some spooky stories.

The two stories today are from Creepy #14 (1967), which I missed when it was published, and have not seen until recently. I went into the U.S. Army in late 1966, and did not see most comics published in early '67. Years later I found out what I had missed was Neal Adams’ first story for Warren Publications. Old-timer Crandall had been around since the beginning of the magazine, which is appropriate, since he was around at the beginning of the comic book industry.

In “Castle Carrion,” a sword-and-sorcery* story written by Archie Goodwin (who also wrote the Adams story), Crandall appears to have given Prince Valiant blond hair and taken him to a castle full of the walking dead. “Curse of the Vampire” is drawn in Adams’ dramatic realistic style, with his dynamic page and panel layouts. It followed the Crandall story, so readers got a chance to see the old giving way to the new.

It is hard to describe what impact an artist like Adams had on comic books in the late sixties. There was just no one like him. He had started out drawing comic strips like “Ben Casey, M.D.” and done work for advertising companies before coming to comic books. I have substituted the four pages of original art found on the Heritage Auctions website for the printed versions. Except for re-sizing, I have left them as Heritage presented them. They are pages 1, 3, 4 and 7. The cover, illustrating the Crandall story, is by Gray Morrow.

Crandall had a couple of strokes, and in 1982, after eight years in a nursing home, died at age 65 of a heart attack. David Saunders has an interesting biography of Crandall in his Pulp Artists web site.

*Here are the illustrations Crandall did  in '66-'68 for books by Edgar Rice Burroughs, in Crandall’s best pen-and-ink style, reminiscent of illustrators of the past. Warning: some nudity.

Number 1609: Russ Heath,“The Executioner”

“The Executioner” has beautiful artwork, and a real feeling of the setting and time, Chicago, 1928. Russ Heath drew this violent crime tale.

The most jarring aspect of the tale is that it was published in Creepy magazine. Not that a stone killer isn’t creepy in his own right, but we expect more of the supernatural from that magazine. I assume Russ’s bona fides as one of the premier comic artists in the industry had something to do with its inclusion. Heath is credited with the story, although either he or the editor didn’t feel he was up to the task of dialogue, because they handed that to Cary Bates.

From Creepy #92 (1977):

Pappy’s enters its ninth year

July 26, 2006 was the day I launched this blog, and as I’ve said before, I did not intend for it to go on this long. The reason it does is because I can still find things that inspire me to share. I guess as long as that is the case, or until I cannot physically do it any longer, I believe I will keep doing what I have been doing.

I was told when I was a kid that I did not have the patience to complete projects, and my critics were right. I guess I grew out of that short attention span (and got on good meds). I managed to hold down the same job for 32 1/2 years before I retired, and I’ve been blogging on a regular schedule for a few years, so to all those people who said I could not do it, HAH! What a burner on you, huh? (Quoting Clark Bent to Lois Pain, from Mad #4.)

When I’ve had some time, I have been going back to my early posts to get rid of the connection I had to Photobucket in the early years. Blogger did not offer much free bandwidth in those days, and I figured I could make up for it by also using Photobucket. But I see there are some links that don’t work because I exceeded the space Photobucket made available to me. It has been a slow process re-doing the old posts, and for a time I was re-editing them. That is an advantage when using the Internet, where unlike print I can go back and change something that now embarrasses me. But after a few of those I thought why do it? If it is an egregious error I can fix it, but the everyday things I said back when this blog was young, embarrassing or not, are part of the record. Besides, I got lazy; it was too much trouble to fix it. Re-doing the old posts is a time consuming task, and I will work on it when I can, but for now if you encounter a dead link, just wait a couple of years. I might get around to fixing it.

A tip of the Pap cap to those readers who have stuck with me so far. Thank you!

Number 958


Gray Morrow back-to-back


Gray Morrow was a terrific illustrator. I noticed his fine black line work in Creepy and Eerie in the '60s. Morrow was the artist who did the first non-Frazetta cover on Creepy, issue #8. I look at his moody painting and think how tough it must have been to follow Frazetta.

For Creepy #3, from 1965, Morrow did these two 6-page strips, which ran together in the issue. What fascinates me today is the same thing that fascinated me when I first saw them: he drew them with totally different techniques, both of which work exceptionally well with the material he's illustrating. These two stories are good examples of how versatile he was.

Sadly, because of illness Morrow took his own life in November 2001, reminding me of the tragedy two decades earlier of Wallace Wood, another artist whose physical disabilities kept him from earning a living at what he did best.

Steve Thompson has a fine blog, Shades of Gray, devoted to Morrow.