Monday, January 30, 2017

The Spirit is Visiting Dick Tracy


I was a big fan of Joe Staton's run on Plastic Man in the early 1980s and now, all these years later, we get to see the gentleman's take on Will Eisner's Spirit. Denny Colt and Inspector Dolan have been special guests in Mr. Staton's Dick Tracy newspaper strip for the last few weeks as you can see in these clippings. And the verdict? I like it!


Thursday, January 19, 2017

Maybe Alex Toth?



Above is the inside back cover from the 1950 DC release of Girls' Love Stories #4. I feel the page is a masterpiece of beautiful artwork, including those fabulous gray-tones (possibly realized using craftint paper). The impeccable lettering is pretty clearly the handiwork of the great Ben Oda but The Grand Comics Database has no clue as to the artist of the piece. My guess would be Alex Toth (who also drew one of the stories in that issue). Just beautiful!

Thursday, January 12, 2017

Chicano Batman


Comics scholars among you will assume from the title of this article that a treatise will be presented having to do with "Ride, Bat-Hombre, Ride!" from Batman #56. The cover of that 1950 issue is displayed above, as drawn by Dick Sprang (and of course I never tire of repeating that I had the pleasure of meeting the wonderful Mr. Sprang back in about 1990).

But in fact The Bat-Hombre is not the matter for today!

Rather, I just learned (and I wanted to make sure you knew also) that Chicano Batman is the name of a current musical group whose genre of music is described as soul/tropical/psychedelic. You can investigate one of their best-known songs over here.

The hayfamzone is all about the sharing of information!



Tuesday, January 10, 2017

No, This is Not a Photo of Me



Fun vintage photo, right? Let's do a little detective work to pinpoint its date of origin.

Do you see Matt Slade second from the top of that row of the comics spinner rack facing the camera? Matt Slade, Gunfighter was an Atlas Comics series that lasted for exactly four issues in 1956. Exactly two of those four issues featured light-colored backgrounds, and exactly one of those two had its Comics Code Authority seal covering up a portion of the top two prongs of the E in the logo's "Slade." Voila! That means the photo features Matt Slade, Gunfighter #1 with a cover date of May 1956.