Number 941


Mysterious Milt Stein


There's just not much information online about animator/cartoonist Milton Stein. Considering his obvious skills, his long tenure in comic books and the animation field, you'd think someone would have a boatload of anecdotes about him. Maybe I just haven't seen them. One of the few things I read about Stein is that he committed suicide in 1977.

The oldest strip of the three I'm showing here today is from Police Comics #30, 1944. The character, Flatfoot Burns, identifies Milt Stein as "that dizzy artist who draws me," and his address as "the 63rd floor of the Vampire State Building." The next story is from a 1946 issue of Timely/Marvel/Atlas' Silly Tunes #5. The last story is a Supermouse story, published in 1957 in the 100-page Supermouse Summer Holiday Issue #1. I've shown this story before. I re-scanned it for this post.

Thanks to Dave Miller for scanning the "Silly and Ziggy" story.

Number 940


John Buscema, Wanted man!


When John Buscema died at age 75 in 2002 he left behind thousands of pages of superhero and fantasy-barbarian artwork for his fans to collect and admire. But like most comic book artists who started in the late 1940s, as he did, the bread-and-butter comic book work was in the genre fields: crime, romance, western, etc. Buscema, who had studied famous illustrators, as well as his comic art gods like Raymond, Foster and Caniff, was a superior artist at depicting "civilian" subjects (non-costumed characters, non-fantasy characters, that is). Looking at these two strips from Orbit Publications' Wanted Comics, you can see all of the things that made Buscema's art great, but in the milieu of the dark, dangerous and dirty world of criminals.

"Gang Doctor" is from Wanted Comics #32, 1950, and "They All Died" is from Wanted Comics #48, 1952:

Number 939


Secret City/Images of Doom


Here's a two-part Flash story from the 1940s, taken from two sources: a reprint from Flash Super-Spectacular #229 from 1974, reprinting the first part, "The Secret City," from All-Flash Comics #31, 1947, and my tear sheets of the second part, "Images of Doom," originally from Flash Comics #94, 1948.

For those of you who came in late to this blog, I've told of my box of tear sheets several times. Over 30 years ago a customer of the bookstore where I worked gave me a box of pages he'd cut from old comic books. He bought comics in the late 1940s, almost all DC, and saved only stories by artists he liked. Carmine Infantino, Joe Kubert, Lee Elias, artists working in the DC house style of the day. I had hundreds of loose pages and I reassembled the stories. As you can see, some of the pages are brittle and damaged.

Both stories were drawn by Carmine Infantino and Frank Giacoia, and written by Robert Kanigher.