The Forest of the Living Dead-Manny Stallman-1951

Manny Stallman to this day is reviled by many Silver Age fans for a pair of RAVEN stories he did for Tower in the sixties. At that same time, though, he cranked out some gorgeous work for Warren and here, a full 15 years earlier, he was turning out some polished art reminiscent of later work by Dick Ayers or even Wally Wood!

The Brain-Sam Kweskin-1957

Unofficial Atlas Week continues here with a lovely post-Code story from Sam Kweskin. I first discovered Sam during his brief return to Marvel in the seventies where he first worked with and then succeeded Bill Everett on SUB-MARINER. A hard act to follow, Kweskin's style never caught on in the Marvel Age and he returned to advertising. Revisiting his early days, one can see he was quite a comics talent in his own right, though!

His Back to the Wall-Alex Toth-1957

Although it very prominently says "By Stan Lee" above, this job certainly gives the impression of being 100% pure Toth from layout to lettering, looking nothing at all like a typical Atlas western of that era in any way. Now, I am NOT a Stan-basher but I do think he may have been overreaching for credit on this one.

Muck!-War Comics-1952

From the period where Stan Lee's Atlas war comics were mimicking former Timely artist Harvey Kurtzman's anti-war war comics from EC, here's a wonderfully atmospheric and yet unsigned tale of Korea while it happened.

Mr. Peanut (Ad-Ventures)-Rafael Astarita-1937

In those pre-intellectual property trademark days, this was a fun little series, always done in rhyme, which starred the various characters from labels and logos of then-familiar Depression-era products. Normally, there's the Morton Salt girl, Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, some politically incorrect characters and a dozen others but this time you just get the Planters Peanuts crew.

Captain Truth-Bob Fujitani-1945

A shirtless kid with pirate boots, gauntlets and a fancy-schmancy hat with a plumed feather in it. Hey, I've seen weirder things in comic books, haven't you? This was a wartime story here taken from one of the notorious IW/Super republishings.

Mrs. Lodge-Bob Bolling-1969/1979

At first glance, it's easy to assume that all Archie comics art looks alike. But if you look a but closer, there's quite a bit of diversity available even though the characters adhere to the house style. Bill Vigoda, Harry Lucey and Dan DeCarlo, Sr are usually easy for me to spot but this rare story spotlighting Veronica's mother has me stymied as the art style looks like nothing I've ever seen in an Archie strip. Not even sure when it dates from as this was from a 1979 digest reprint. 

UPDATE: See comments for more info!

The Liberator-Exciting Comics-1943

This guy and his ancient Egyptian potion are among the Public Domain characters who get revived every so often by different companies. The Liberator was even retconned by Alan Moore at one point. No idea who did this original strip, though.