The Who's Who's credits for John Fischetti started out as just "Fischetti" on Tommy Tomorrow, if I remember correctly, but now encompass any number of 1950s series at DC--most of them inking Curt Swan, going by the list's matching up with Swan's series there at the time. These four stories at the end of Swan's run on Tommy Tomorrow look to be inked by someone else with a heavier brush, and I would think it's Ray Burnley, who was inking Swan on Gangbustersand such. Swan/Burnley would soon be the art team on Jimmy Olsen when that title started up in 1954, and for a number of years. These tie ..read more

Finishing up Robert Bernstein's scripts for Crime Does Not Pay; the title ended with #147. (It went under the Comics Code with #143.) But first: while going over the last issues I made a few artist IDs. When I saw Dick Giordano's earliest stuff at Charlton it seemed to me there was a George Evans influence. Sure enough, a Giordano/Vince Alascia job at Lev Gleason has been miscredited in the Grand Comics Database to Evans--"The Fall of the Saturday Night Gang," shown above. Giordano/Alascia have "Unheeded Warning" in the next issue, CDNP 145, correctly attributed to them, and their story in ..read more

One point makes it easy to tell E. Nelson Bridwell's scripting on DC's Angel and the Ape. Most of the other writers' ape-speak by Sam Simeon is gibberish, but Bridwell's, beginning with #4, is garbled English. In issue #6 the first story, "The Robbing Robot," is credited on the splash page to John Albano (thus I haven't listed it here). "The Ape of 1,000 Disguises" in the same issue is uncredited. Compare the ape-speak, given with translations. The ape-speak in Showcase #77 is garbled English too, but the sound effects confirm the scripting as Howard Post's. Angel and the Ape #1 confuses me ..read more

As of 1950 Carl Wessler's personal records are complete enough to name most of his scripts for Crime Does Not Payat Lev Gleason, so stories are noted as his on the Grand Comics Database. The source is Robin Snyder's Wessler bibilography in The Comics, compiled from those records. Here I have another couple of his where the records didn't give the titles. "The Last Mile for Tony" contains both an "Ohoo" and an "Owooo" to show Wessler wrote it. I haven't found any Wessler stories on CDNP after mid-'51 that he didn't fully record. The GCD wonders if "The Rabbit-Punch Murder Case" could be the 9 ..read more

Here's Robert Bernstein's next couple of years writing for Crime Does Not Pay for Lev Gleason. I hadn't convinced myself of his writing the Who Dunnit? story in #70 when I did the first list. CDNP closes out 1950 with #94, but I don't see Bernstein work in those last issues of the year. As I was looking for Bernstein stories I found a couple by Carl Wessler that didn't get to the CGD from his records. In this tier from "Jack Rosca," note the exclamation that I haven't seen Robert Bernstein ever use. Crime Does Not Pay Anthology Stories 1949-50 Written by Robert Bernstein Dec/48 70&nbs ..read more

1950's Mansion of Evil from Fawcett Gold Medal Books is credited only to the scripter, Joseph Millard. The artist is Bud Thompson. The tiers below, from the story "Guilty of Murder" in the final issue of Fawcett's Captain Marvel Jr.--#119, June 1953--show some of the same silhouetted or partially silhouetted figures as in Mansion of Evil. The previous guess on the Mansion of Evil art is George Evans--but only on two of the eleven chapters, when the style is the same throughout ..read more

Nowadays every issue of a comic book is a temporarily embarrassed graphic novel. My definition of graphic novel: A book using original comics material in narrative. The important word here is book, so length isn't a criterion--"novel" encompasses collections (like A Contract with God, by the way). A magazine isn't a book, so His Name Is Savage, for instance, doesn't meet the definition. And if it isn't limited to original material, the floodgates open for an appalling number of titles from comic strips and comic books. Note that these three Pogo books are the original-material ones among, o ..read more

Bunny_LemoineThe only attribution at the moment for the art on Harvey's Sixties teen-type title Bunnyis Hy Eisman. His sneak signature is in a number of early stories in the form of the license plate "Hy 27 E" on four different cars in "Discarteque" (#1), "The Ultrazaric Decodifier," "Guests from England," and "Poetic Justice" (#2); the "27" (Eisman's birthday) is on photographer Elmer Snapple's door in "The Playpen Contest" (#1) and it continues on his door in, for instance, "The 'Zoople' Contest" (#2). And since Eisman is the main artist, when there are figures (of secondary characters) i ..read more

Jack Oleck's writing style is recognizable in the Had-He-But-Known phrasing on the first page of his first story for Atlas's Journey into Mystery: Monty could still think, then...he could still reason... The main writer for the Atlas fantasy anthologies by this time is Carl Wessler, with rather more stories than Oleck; Wessler's are known from Robin Snyder's transcribing the writer's records in History of the Comics. Marvel Taleswas cancelled with #159 in the Atlas Implosion in 1957; Journey into Mystery was too, with #47, but was reinstated a year later with a few issues out of inventory ..read more

Writer Burt Frohman kept records by filing away his comic-book scripts with copies of the issues they were published in; when the Frohman collection was sold off, the scripts were included with the relevant comics. Doc V. shows a few Frohman scripts for Atlas in his Timely-Atlas-Comics post on Stan Lee in the Timely years (use Find twice for Frohman). This is a script page that was on the Internet by itself (at this point I can't recall where); the stapled-on note to the artist creates a problem in connecting the script with the published story, as the note covers up most of the recipient and ..read more