Bill Peckmann &Comic Art &Illustration 09 Sep 2011 07:18 am
Toth’s “Wings of Eagles” – 1
- 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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on 09 Sep 2011 at 9:07 am 1.Mark Mayerson said …
Thanks for this. I knew Toth adapted this John Ford film, but I’ve never seen the comic. It’s hard condensing a feature film into 32 pages. The film itself is a mixed bag, but the comics scripter (who wasn’t Toth) didn’t do a very good job of capturing the film’s emotional moments. And if I remember correctly, Wead’s fall down the stairs was because his child called out in the night. The child is completely absent here, maybe because Western Publishing didn’t want to put parents separating in a comic for children.