Blue Monday Calendar 2018 Week 21

Okay... I missed Friday and the weekend, but at least i finally noticed that today was Monday.

This week's Gil Elvgren painting is Plenty Sharp (Get The Point) from 1959 -

Old Masters

While i'm dealing with tech issues, here's a little quickie post with some early, likely unfamiliar, work from a couple very familiar names, most often associated with Batman and Superman - Jerry Robinson and Murphy Anderson.

First up, from All New Comics, Jerry's tale of the Fangs Of The Panther -

From Man O' Mars comes Murphy Anderson's Life On Other Worlds short features - these two covering Uranus and Saturn -

pages from All New Comics #11 and Man O' Mars #1 (1945, 1953)

Antiques Of Opar

Still having major connection issues, so crossing fingers...

Let's do another 100 year leap back to 1918.
Modern fantasy artists study the works of Frank Frazetta and Roy Krenkel. They were both students of J. Allen St. John. In 1918 the serialized Tarzan And The Jewels Of Opar was published in book form, with illustrations from St. John.

Here's the look of fantasy & space opera 100 years ago -

illustrations by J. Allen St. John for Tarzan & The Jewels Of Opar (1918)

More Old Joe

The Universe, as you might have already noticed, has a wicked sense of humour. As i've noted before, all too often, we are the punchline. As i try to get some focus back on the blog and outside world, the net connection suddenly starts manifesting strange non-connection issues. (For example, the connection died multiple times while writing this, but i believe i can get it to post later on, before i give up for the day) Hopefully, they won't go supercritical.
Meanwhile...

When we think of Joe Kubert's artwork, it tends to be highly detailed and very individualized inks, almost instantly recognizable, such as this shot of one of his most well known tours of duty -

But, as we saw previously, that wasn't always the case. One of my favorite examples of this divide between his earlier and later works is his Son Of Sinbad -

Were it not for his signature, Kubert would have been pretty far down my list of guesses on the identity of the artist. But, back in 1950 (eight years after the Volton strips from last time) St. John put out a full book of Joe Kubert's Son Of Sinbad tales -

In addition to that first splash above, there were three more tales -

Of course, splash pages are nice teases, but tend to leave one wondering how the stories themselves played out. So, let's go back to those first images and see the debut tale of Son Of Sinbad -

pages by Joe Kubert for Son Of Sinbad #1 (1950)

The Human Generator

One of these days i'll get around to posting about why Cat-Man is better than Batman. Not today. (But, for the record, it's been a long time since i was a big Batman fan. Batman was the great "Human" hero, once upon a time - no longer. Now he's a demigod and might as well be an alien superhuman.)

Today, let's look in the back pages of Cat-Man and pull out an odd little character - Volton! (no r)

Joe Kubert has been around so long that it's easy to forget that he was once just another artist, yet to work out his iconic style. Volton was one of his early training grounds, running as a back-up feature for 5 issues Cat-Man, #s 8-12 back in 1942, just 2 years into his professional career. At six pages per story, that's only 30 pages total, so let's run them all, eh?

Kubert's Volton got a cover introduction on Cat-Man #8, but with seemingly random-generated colours with no relation to his costume inside the comics:

Notice that last blurb had no mention of another episode, enjoining the reader to watch for the next issue of the comic instead. So far as i know, Volton never adventured again.

pages by Joe Kubert for Cat-Man #s 8-12 (1942)