Covering TC Artists

I've expressed my fondness for seeing Creators in their comics previously.
Let us expand that to include seeing Creators ON their comics...

How many of these folks can you identify?

Oh, sure - it's an old cover, but there are a few fairly famous names in the crowd. And, of course, it hasn't been very long since you had a look at Frank Borth, so that one should be fairly easy - right?

And, you might not know his name, but i'm willing to bet you can make a fair guess which one is the Editor.

Other famous names include one of DC's most prominent Editors (though an artist here), one of Jack Kirby's most beloved collaborators, a classic pulp artist of renown, and some familiar names from this blog (like the guy who draws The Bear).

And, Yes - if you're wondering...

I am rambling to stall and create spoiler space, because the answers are down
below.
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         . right here...

The cover was drawn by Reed Crandall, the guy who was playing the comb before getting the trash can lids slammed over his head.

Incidentally - this was the cover to the first issue of the Draw-Along With Frank Borth series. Kind of an unfair spotting advantage, eh?

cover art by Reed Crandall from Treasure Chest Of Fun & Fact v18 #11 (1963)

My Favorite Caveman

I started building towards this topic a little over two years ago. Regular readers know the struggle, but we've finally wrangled the beast back around this way...

One of Jack Kirby's many great concepts was the inception of the Inhumans (and similarly the Eternals & Deviants). Highly advanced alien races experimenting on emerging Humanity to see what they can make from the raw clay of Man. (the species, not the sex)

In 1975, over at Gold Key Comics, a new caveman comic crawled up on the shore - Don Glut and Jesse Santos teamed up like peanut butter & chocolate and brought us Tragg and the Sky Gods. Engaging the same basic concepts, they didn't jump ahead thousands of years to see the results. Instead, they told the tale of the new Humans resulting from their experiments, and their interactions with the primitive world of cavemen and dinosaurs. (It's comics, not science)

After two issues, they switched to painted covers. Still Jesse Santos and still looking mighty fine, but i really prefer the psychedelia infused feel of his inks. Here's the other drawn-not-painted cover -

Tragg only had 8 issues, plus a Gold Key Spotlight comic. Some will tell you that there's also that issue of The Occult Files Of Dr. Spektor, but that's a single panel lacking even name designations, so it's a cameo at most. That's not a whole lot of comics, but they were fairly densely packed. The first issue has 25 pages of story - let's ago ahead and dive in rather than have me try to break things down for you...

Let me pause to say how much i enjoy the way Don & Jesse play together. Beyond Tragg, they also teamed for the aforementioned Dr. Spektor, and for Dagar The Invincible, too, along with a smattering of Mystery tales.
I rather thought that we'd have covered some of them by now, but we'll get there.

Meanwhile, let's cover the rest of this series, shall we? 
Here are Jesse's painted covers for the run of Tragg -

...and, what the heck - here's the cover to that issue of The Occult Files Of Dr. Spektor that has the single panel in it. Just because...

I expect we'll be back to check on Tragg and Lorn's progress. But i also expected we'd be here two years ago...

page art by Jesse Santos for Tragg And The Sky Gods #1 (plus covers) (1975)

Covering Out Of This World

This machine is still limping along without hard drive, running off of USB sticks. But it's actually the least impediment to posting lately. My mind is scuttling away from the outside world, making focusing on the posts more difficult, but fighting my way past that, too.

And then there's Blogger's 'upgrade' and the thoroughly frelled image uploads. That's a killer. It was only on the last attempt before giving up for the day that it finally upped the images for this post.

So, my apologies for the gaps lately - i'm working on it, but others are working against it. Hopefully things will smooth out soon.

Meanwhile, since the brain doesn't want to focus on wordly bits much, lets take a look at some covers. Out Of This World only had 16 issues between 1956 - 1959. That run of fewer than a dozen & a half issues sure produced a number of nice covers, don't you think...?

Of course, it never hurts to have Steve Ditko on your team.

cover art by Bill Molno, Steve Ditko, Maurice Whitman, Pat Masulli, Rocco Mastroserio, Charles Nichola, Vince Alascia, and Dick Giordano from Out Of This World #s 1-16 (1956, 1959)