Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

The Wings of Eagles was a 1957 Action Adventure film directed by John Ford, starring John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara. Try to get it on Netflix; it’s one of Ford’s classics. Alex Toth was hired by Dell to create the comic version of the film. Bill Peckmann not only saved his copy of the comic but sent a copy to me to post. It’s classic Toth. Part 1 appeared here.

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the End Paper

the Back Cover

As a special treat, Bill Peckmann added these five pages of Doodles by Alex Toth. 1

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Many thanks to Bill Peckmann for sharing these rare bits with us.

- We’ve come to the end of the posting of the great Carl Barks story, Luck of the North. Bill Peckmann, has been so kind as to send these scans on to us to post. We’ll finish with the newly recolored version of the story complete with airbrushed backgrounds. However, because of the complaints about this version – particularly in regard to the airbrushed backgrounds – we’re showing some of the other versions of the first of the pages in this section. We’ll start with these originals.

Let’s start with the cover. First, I’ll repost the background I’ve shown in the past. Following this is the newer version done for the Gladstone Giant reprint.

The original comic cover.

Bill Peckman wrote: This is the cover of the Gladstone Giant reprint, Nicely done.

B.P. wrote: With the Part 1 commentary about
original color printing vs. reprint color vs. a black and white print job,
I figured we could open with the first page of Part 3 shown in three versions.
Here’s the B&W page.

This is the original comic book.

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This is the Gladstone Giant reprinted page
followed by the remainder of the story.

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B.P. writes: One of the best reasons for getting the Gladstone reprints was the excellent and knowledgeable running editorial commentary by Geoffrey Blum in each Barks issue.
Only right that it should be included here.
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B.P. writes: Here are the endpaper and back cover gags from the original comic book.

(Sorry about my blue rubber stamping but even as kids we knew that these books were pure golden treasure!)

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You can find the first two parts here: Part 1 & Part 2.

- Bill Peckman continues to delight with some of the brilliant artwork he scans for my site. It’s a pleasure to post it and study it. Here, we have the comic book version of The John Ford/John Wayne film, “Wings of Eagles.” Here’s what Bill wrote:

Alex Toth‘s passion for aviation was only second to his love for art, so he must have welcomed and relished this assignment when it came in from Dell/Western Publishing. It was the comic book adaptation of the biopic movie “Wings Of Eagles” (1957). It also didn’t hurt that Alex was a big fan of the movie’s director, John Ford. Here’s hoping that the backlit computer screen will offset some of the printing press problems of those days of yore (It Does!) and make the pages look closer to what Toth had envisioned. The originals would have been an eyeful to see! Go to the Bruce Canwell and Dean Mullaney book, “Alex Toth, Genius Isolated” to see what Alex’s original Dell art work looked like before quite a bit of it was lost in the primitive pulp printing process.

So here without further ado, is John Ford, John Wayne and Alex Toth’s “Wings Of Eagles”!

The Front Cover

Inner Front Cover

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One of the best pages in the book, too bad the colorist
miscolored the big double panel. The bg. color should have
been the deep blue sea, not the light blue sky.

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- Here we have the continuation of the great Carl Barks story, Luck of the North. Pt. 1 was featured here. We pick up where we left off.

But first here’s a painting Barks did inspired by the original comic cover:

Art appears in “The Art of Walt Disney’s Donald Duck by Carl Barks”.

Luck of the North
Bigmouth Donald tricks his cousin Gladstone into a wild-goose chase
after a fake treasure map. and then, conscience-stricken,
chases him down through the polar bear-infested Arctic.

(Dell’s Donald Duck Four Color #256, December, 1949; see page 48).
Barks turned the cover concept into a nightscape, studded with
stars and haloed by the northern lights.
“That’s where I had my trouble,” he comments,”
in that northern lights effect at the top.
I found pictures of northern lights in some
Geographics and I kind of stole some.”

An afterthought, and Barks adds,
“I find water very difficult to paint.
It’s hard work, but I worked at this until
I got it to look halfway authentic.”

Has he ever compromised on a story idea because
of its difficulty? “It may be that I had the sense
to do that once in a while, but I doubt it. I generally just
plunged right in on an idea whether I was going to have
trouble or not. I’d start out with a simple idea,
and keep on elaborating on it until I had a
real complex thing going.”

Though one of Barks’ most famous stories,
this is the only painting of it he did.

The original comic cover.

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To be continued.
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- Here are some more comic book covers courtesy of Bill Peckmann. From his incredible collection, he’s sent us a blast of early covers by Harvey Kurtzman. Bill’s note reads:

Sorry, these covers are far from being pristine, but I thought it’d be neat to show Harvey Kurtzman’s comic book covers (TWO-FISTED TALES, FRONTLINE COMBAT and MAD) in the order that he drew them. These are from 1951.

Here comes some great drawing.

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More from Bill:

In issue No. 5 of ‘Frontline Combat” was one of Harvey’s classic war stories titled “Big ‘If’!”. No time like the present to send it along.

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- Having pulled into the great Carl Barks story, “Sheriff of Bullet Valley,” we can’t repeat the adventure, but we can find another just about as good. “Luck of the North” is a gem. Bill Peckmann has begun sending a copy of the comic book in a reprint mode, and here are his comments:

It’s a reprint of Dell’s 1949 Donald Duck Four Color #256 titled “Luck of the North”. The cover is from the original comic, but the re colored, reprinted story is from Gladstone Publishing, LTD.’s Giant Comic Albums.

He also sends along the original comic printing of the first title page of the story. You can see how much was missing from Barks’ brilliant art in the pulp mode printing.

Anyway, here’s part 1 taken from a reprint version:

The original comic cover.

This is what the original comic looked like.

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Bill’s note on the page above reads: ____________
_______________One of the all time impressive comic book pages!

____________ And I have to agree with him.

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To be continued.
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- Bill Peckmann has sent a number of early Jack Davis crawings our way, so let me turtn it over to Bill:

After Jack left EC/Mad Comics in the late ’50′s, after Harvey Kurtzman’s “Trump” and “Humbug” magazine’s didn’t get the solid footing they so richly deserved and went belly up, and before Jack carved out that wonderfully successful niche for himself in the world of humorous illustration in the ’60′s, he had to really scramble for work to keep the wolf from the door. Here are some examples from that period from late 1958 to 1961. Jack would say that some of this art was done in his “fast” style.

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These first four western covers were done for
Stan Lee for Atlas Comics, later to become Marvel Comics.

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A cover for “Cracked” Magazine, Mad’s longest running rival.

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4 B&W pages from inside “Cracked”.
The first 3 pages are a spoof on TV show “Peter Gunn”.

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A single page (Kurtzman type) gag.

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This western magazine was published by Jim Warren
who also published Harvey Kurtzman’s “Help!” Magazine.
It was rumored that Harvey was also the editor of this book,
I don’t know about that.

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A 3 page gag from “Wildest Westerns”.

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Believe it or not, Jack actually did a Dell Comic book.

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4 pages from “Yak Yak”.

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All the art was sent in the chronological order it was done.

- Following up yesterday’s post of Walt Kelly’s Animal Comics, we have more of his covers for Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories. Not all of these were done by Kelly, but most are. These came fresh off of Bill Peckmann‘s hot scanner, and I thank him for sharing his amazing archive with us.

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by Walt Kelly

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by Carl Barks

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by Walt Kelly

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by Walt Kelly

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by Walt Kelly

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by Walt Kelly

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by Walt Kelly

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by Walt Kelly

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by Walt Kelly

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by Walt Kelly

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by Walt Kelly

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by Carl Buettner

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by Carl Buettner

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by Carl Buettner

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Pencils: Walt Kelly, Inking: Carl Buettner(?)

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Pencils: Walt Kelly, Inking: Carl Buettner(?)

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by Carl Barks

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by Carl Barks

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by Carl Barks

- Bill Peckmann sent scans of an incredible comic. It’s an early issue of Animal Comics (June/July 1947) with Walt Kelly‘s Pogo making an early appearance. The bulk of the magazine is the Pogo story, however there are a couple of other short pieces. We have doubt that Kelly did these other strips, (Jigger, Chuck Wagon Charley, Uncle Wiggily, and Rover), so if anyone out there knows, please drop a comment. Other than that, all I can say is enjoy and thank you Mr. Peckmann.

comic cover

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Jigger was done by the great John Stanley
of “Little Lulu” fame.

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- Last week I posted a bunch of beautiful covers to Walt Disney Comics from the 40′w. For the most part they were done by Walt Kelly, and they were stunning. Here, thanks to another beautiful lode sent me by the inestimable Bill Peckmann, are some more of these wonderful covers by Kelly (except where noted). They are all gems. You can see the hint of Pogo starting to peek through in the non-Disney, secondary characters. Such clear composition and such clean design.

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This is Carl Barks’ second cover that he did for “Comics and Stories”.

Many thanks, again, to Bill Peckmann for sharing his immense and invaluable collection.