Showing posts with label Ed Wheelan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ed Wheelan. Show all posts

19 April 2020

Wheelan's Weekend Film Festival

Back in 1939 at the dawn of Comics, Ed Wheelan created a strip for Movie Comics entitled Minute Movies. These were essentially old serials in half-page comic strip form. They were printed in two-colour format (black & red ink) and featured regular players - a brilliant concept, really. But Movie Comics lasted only a half dozen issues and Ed moved over to Flash Comics where he invented Flash Movies decades before we came to know them. After a few months, he decided to bring back the Minute Movies, now fully realized in concept.

Directed by Art Hokum and starring Dick Dare, Hazel Dearie, Will Power, Blanche Rouge, Paul Vogue, Lotta Talent, Andrew Handy (Don't call him Andy), and the rest of the Minute Movie Players - including the great villain Ralph McSneer, and comedy buffoon Fuller Phun. Not to mention, Milo the chimpanzee.

Each issue they'd mount a new production - Now Showing All Month!


As you can see above, Wheelan also got the jump on Bob Rozakis by several decades, too. It's interesting that this Answer Man delivers only the answers - figure out the questions for yourself! 
Ed kind of presages another feature i've been planning (ask the Mindbender from Mars, he knows. As usual.)

As noted in the green box above, Minute Movies did not appear in the next issue, but returned in #18 and stuck around for almost 50 more issues.


You didn't think i was kidding about Milo, the chimp, did you...?
 

Our weekend film festival continues this afternoon. And we might even get to meet the great Director.

page art by Ed Wheelan from Flash Comics #s 16, 18, & 19 (1941)

20 November 2019

Return To Comics

You folks remember "Comics" McCormick, - "The World's No. 1 Comic Book Fan" - right?
If not, the link in his name above will take you to the previous posts on our reality warped hero from Ed Wheelan

Either way, while the mind is off wandering, i figured we could do with a bit of revisiting, so here's trio of tales from his short run in Terrific Comics -




That brings us to about half of his published adventures. I suspect we'll get to the other half eventually, eh?

page art by Ed McWheelan for Terrific Comics #s 3, 5, & 6 (1944)

15 August 2018

Hey, Kids! "Comics"!

Going to be working on the hardware today and tomorrow, so might not be around a great deal.

Meanwhile, a little more of Ed Wheelan's  "Comics" McCormick - The World's No. 1 Comic Book Fan. As mentioned last time, he had just shy of a dozen adventures, but they were fairly unlimited in scope. Let's take a look at those splash panels -

McCormick's second story introduced his first recurring villain - The Octopus.



The Space Pirates would return as well. Both the Octopus and the Pirates return for the tales in his final issue.





Fat And Slat #4 featured the above two tales, and "Comics" McCormick's only cover. Sadly, the title folded and the promise of more next issue was never realized.


We didn't run the splash panels from yesterday's stories - nor to his first story to appear. Here's that first tale in its entirety -


art by Ed Wheelan from Terrific Comics #s 2-6, Cat-Man #28, and Fats And Slats #s 1-4 (1944, 1945, 1947, 1948)