Thursday, April 30, 2020
Halfway to Halloween
We're officially halfway to Halloween 2020, and even though we're isolating ourselves in quarantine and practicing safe social distancing-- today is still your lucky day! That's right, we're having a masquerade ball here at AEET, and famous news photographer, Lucky Starr himself has invited you all along to share in the haunted house shenanigans, plus, plenty of bad guys, bad/good golden age artwork, hellacious costumes, and more! This is a very funny story from the August 1946 issue of Lucky Comics #5, with a sense of ball bustin' humor that could only come from a comic of this era. The art by Alan Mandel is fun, though a little uneven at times, but that Walter Johnson cover is hotter than Hell! And for more spooky good times, head over to THE HORRORS OF IT ALL where, of course, every day is Halloween!
This could have been reworked as a Spiderman comic, since both Lucky and Peter Parker are both newspaper photographers. The ending would have been the kidnappers caught by Spiderman and exclusive pictures for The Daily Bugle.
ReplyDeleteI like art, it's uneven and has an amateur vibe to it but it's so very 40s comic art. One very 40s thing is the amount of time the artist puts into breast shadows, last page panel 2 & 3 would make indecency crusaders pick up a torch!
ReplyDeleteJMR777 above said this could be a spider-man comic, but it could also be any 40s teenager comic. This would have worked as Archie!
I like the old-fashioned art, even though I see what you mean about it being a little uneven. But at its best, it kind of has a golden age newspaper strip vibe going on--which feels germane. It makes me wonder if there are Halloween arcs for any of the classic continuity strips?
ReplyDeleteHappy halfway to Halloween! Down here under the equator, where yesterday was the last day of the first full month of fall, I like to refer to Walpurgisnacht as "Southern Halloween," and I celebrated by watching horror movies all month long. Like I do every month.