Number 1353: War Gods of the Deep

In the sixties I made a point to see movies with Vincent Price, especially movies based on stories by Poe. So why did I miss War Gods of the Deep, based on Poe's “City In the Sea”? I don't know. I wasn’t aware of it, or was busy doing something else, I guess. I’ve still never seen the movie, and can't comment on it. But the comic book adaptation, which came out in 1965, is well done. The artwork is credited by the Grand Comics Database to John Tartaglione, inked by Dick Giordano. There's a lot of photo reference in the panels, but at least the characters look like the actors in the movie.

Dell had a weird numbering system for comics in the Movie Classics line, and this one is considered to be #900.

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Number 911


Giordano in space


When Dick Giordano died at age 77 on May 27, 2010, he left behind a legacy of comics work that stretched back to the early 1950s. Giordano had been a well-respected artist, inker and editor at both Charlton and DC over six decades, but at one time he was a 20-year-old artist working on various genres at Charlton. I have three science fiction stories drawn by him from Space Adventures #4, 5, and 6, all from 1953.

Charlton, always a notoriously low-paying publisher, at the time was using a lot of artists who didn't have quite the professional flair of artists for the larger comics houses. Giordano's work, compared to his later, slicker work, is bit rough around the edges, but has a lot of energy to it. It's obvious he enjoyed what he was doing.

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GOOD GRIEF! MORE OF THE JEEPERS GIRL!

I've found one more example of what I call the Jeepers girl, a corpse, swiped by different artists and found in various places about the history of Golden Age comics. For more Jeepers girls go to Pappy's #727 and Pappy's #788, which links to another blogger who has found over one dozen examples of the Jeepers girl on magazines and paperback books.

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