Number 1029


Leiber and Fox


Someone did me a big favor by posting online the backup stories from Marvel's Journey Into Mystery #83 to 104. I bought that comic regularly. Among the stories I remember were the five-pagers by Larry Leiber and Matt Fox.

I thought Leiber's art in those days was kind of rough, and combined with Fox's busy pen inking gave the stories their own oddball look. Like a lot of other fanboys in those days I dismissed it as not being up to the standards of Marvel artists like Kirby and Ditko. I didn't know that Leiber would find a career at Marvel, but at the time I also didn't know he was Stan Lee's brother. To his credit Leiber built a career in comics. He worked at it and got better. I also didn't know that Matt Fox's art was what we'd now call outsider art. He had a particular and peculiar vision. His Weird Tales artwork is considered classic, and here are three of my favorite covers by him:



Fox had also done interior drawings for Weird Tales, and comic book work in the early '50s for Stan Lee and a couple of other publishers.

Nowadays I find the Leiber/Fox team's artwork charming, if I may use that word. I like it and appreciate it more now than when I first saw it.

Here are four of the stories from that online source. "The Purple Planet" is from Journey Into Mystery #98, "The Unreal" from JIM #100, "The Enemies" from JIM #101, and "The Menace" from JIM #102.

The panel reproduced on the top of this page gave my high school buddy Ron and I a big laugh in 1963. We thought it looked like some kind of weird alien urination. It was the interpretation of immature minds, but hey, I still think that's what it looks like.

Number 1028


Kubert's newsboys


Joe Kubert was only about 19 or 20 when he drew this Newsboy Legion story. The strip was created by Jack Kirby and Joe Simon, who were probably still in uniform when this episode was drawn.

The Newsboy Legion had been around since 1942, when it displaced the Star Spangled Kid and Stripesy as the lead feature of Star Spangled Comics #7. Although another Simon and Kirby kid strip, Boy Commandos, appeared in Detective Comics and its own title until 1949, after 1947's issue #64 of Star Spangled the boys of the Newsboy Legion and The Guardian had gone out of business, both as newsboys and crime fighters.

Joe's art is a bit crude, but only crude compared to how good he became within a short time. He had his mentors at DC, including Mort Meskin, and Joe became a mentor with the school that bears his name. What goes around...

The Grand Comics Database credits the inks to George Roussos, and the script to Joe Samachson.

From Star Spangled Comics #50, 1945:

Number 1027


The Lady and the Beetle


Comic book publisher Victor Fox had a reputation for being a sharpy in business. Fox went with trends like crime, jungle and love and despite the woeful company management Fox Features made their comics interesting and sleazy--to attract readers. They went out of business, anyway. Being a sharpy has a way of coming back on a businessman.

Phantom Lady was an established character with Quality Comics, created by the Eisner-Iger studio. To make a long story short--because the Phantom Lady's history with different publishers needs a genealogy chart to make sense--Phantom Lady was published by Fox when Jerry Iger's shop was producing comics for them, including eight issues of Phantom Lady, just before the demise of Fox Features publications. The numbering began with #13, so these two stories are from the first issue.

Matt Baker signed the artwork on the Phantom Lady story, but the Blue Beetle strip is signed Otis. I see occasional flashes of Baker in the Blue Beetle artwork--a couple of faces and some poses here and there--but it looks to me as if more than one, and maybe more than two artists worked over the strip. Since the inking looks consistent I'm guessing one artist inked the whole mess to give it some sort of cohesiveness.

The proportions were changed on the Phantom Lady strip. It was originally shorter, so artwork was added to the tops of the panels. Why was it drawn that way originally? I dunno.

From Phantom Lady #13, 1947: