While one might wish all day that the great comics stylist Steve Ditko had continued at Marvel on Spidey and Doc Strange, if one looks it's easy enough to see that the work he doid for Charlton Comics all during the sixties and seventies was not exactly slapdash either. This GHOSTLY TALES example is, in fact, quite inventive!
No relation to the 1939 Roy Rogers movie of the same name, THE ARIZONA KID was an Atlas western that featured okay stories but some really good art by Pete Morisi and, as you can see here, very good coloring for the day, also. Morisi was an artist with a unique, remarkably clean style that had a foot in the Caniff /Sickles school and at times reminded one of Alex Toth. When the comics market dried up in the 1950's, he became a police officer. Picking up some extra work in the sixties, he returned to drawing and famously signed Charlton's THUNDERBOLT with his initials, PAM, so his superiors wouldn't know it was him. If they had ben comics fans, they could not have avoided recognizing that style, though!
Cartoonist Irv Tirman, under the pseudonym Ira Turner, drew the adventures of the spoof superhero, Lieutenant Hercules in GREEN LAMA COMICS. As such, they were surrounded by some incredible comics art from Mac Raboy and Jerry Robinson. They held their own quite well. This is one of a series of stories in which the wizard Merlin has taken Hercules to Comic land where strip characters are real. In this story, our hero has to help Little Orphan Annie but we also see some Smilin' Jack characters long enough for a joke repeated in the MAD parody of that strip a decade later.
CAPTAIN FLASH was an off season superhero, appearing in his own book from Sterling in 1955, well past the Golden Age and yet still a year away from the start of the Silver Age, generally credited as being the debut of National/DC's non-Captain FLASH. TOMBOY was a backup strip with a teenage female heroine with art credited to Edvard Moritz.
Here we have Homer K Beagle, the stereotypical naive, easygoing fella who just wants to be a detective. Here we also have Homer staying the night in a haunted house secretly being used by crooks as a hideout. There is nothing new here at all but what IS here is nicely executed in a lighthearted way by unsung cartoonist Harvey K Fuller who did good work in the industry for a few years, then went into painting. Homer had his own series in YOUNG KING COLE.
I know absolutely nothing about this story nor does GCD. It appeared in the final issue of the Sunbeam bread tie-in comic, LITTLE MISS SUNBEAM in late 1950. I just liked the cartooning and the story was mildly amusing.
I never really paid much attention to Klaus Nordling before but he was GOOD! He did quite a bit of work for Quality Comics, ghost-drew a bunch of the post-watr SPIRIT strips for Will Eisner and did some enchanting Christmas comics--some of which you can find reprinted in the just published book, THE GREAT TREASURY OF CHRISTMAS COMIC BOOK STORIES. His main claim to fame in comics history, though, was LADY LUCK, which ran as one of the back-up features in THE SPIRIT SECTION with reprints in SMASH COMICS. SMASH eventually became LADY LUCK and Nordling did all-new stories in a style reminiscent of Howie Post, Jack Cole and Will Eisner--such as the one seen here.
