My thanks to Steven Thompson for placing Lou Cameron in my path. If you like his work, Mr. Thompson also wrote the introduction for a new collection of Cameron's horror work - Lou Cameron's Unsleeping Dead. As we look at Lou this weekend, i'll be trying to avoid material in the book - but i don't actually know what that is. The advert only list five titles for 144 pages. Once again it seems there's a lot i don't know.
Before the recommendation, Lou Cameron was a name that i had seen, but had little attached to it. Only vague memories of seeing him listed as an artist for Classics Illustrated at one time. It turns out, however, that most readers of old comics were familiar with his work, even if they didn't know who it was. His work ran and reran in DC comics for decades...
Well, no surprise we didn't know his name from those public service ads. After all, PSAs very rarely receive credits. But i did see some of his Classics Illustrated work, including what i believe is the only cover he did for the series -
Here's the splash page for that story, and a few others from Cameron -
Only one story is signed, and policy in those days was to give publishers and editors bragging rights while ignoring the actual creators of the work. Due to my backlash reaction to the egotistic arrogance of those old credit policies, it took me many years to learn the value of an Editor. It always looked like money and bosses got credit, anybody actually important remained a secret mystery.
I might be rambling...
So, anyway - with no credits, it's not a major surprise that Cameron escaped my notice even though i had a few of his Classics Illustrated tales. It turns out that i had seen his work in a few other places, but he had escaped my notice as they were old issues i had picked up for the Jack Kirby tales which they contained.
It's hard not to get overshadowed by Kirby, especially when i was specifically looking for his work at the time. But now that i'm going back and digging into his comic works, i'm digging Lou.
Tomorrow and Sunday we'll be running several old Cameron science fiction and horror comic tales. We might even manage to squeeze in an old war story, too. (Wait... does World War III count as an old war?)
Join us for a weekend of Lou Cameron, following the morning's Saturday Solutions post.
art by Lou Cameron from various DC titles, Space Action #1, and Classics Illustrated #s 3, 13, 124, 129 & 133 (1950s, 1960s)
