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Jack Coles' The Claw

When I first read Greg Sadowski’s Supermen!: The First Wave of Comic Book Heroes 1936-1941, I was a bit disappointed. My preference is for anthologies that have a strong editorial vision like Art Out of Time or The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics. Supermen! seemed like it was governed less by an editorial imperative than a chronological one. Some of the comics in the book are very strong (especially the stories by Jack Cole, Fletcher Hanks, and Basil Wolverton) but many of them also seemed primitive in a bad way (crude, simple-minded) rather than a good way (Hanks’ vitalism).

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From Sean Howe’s research files, an historical curiosity. First, a semi-famous page from X-Men.

From X-Men #57 (June 1969)

Specifying this very image, Les Daniels has written that “Neal Adams shattered comic book layout conventions with pages like this one.”

Now look at this Comet page drawn by Jack Cole for Pep, nearly three decades earlier: (more…)

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See if you can catch the several (not-important-at-all-oh-no) mistakes I’ve cleverly hidden in my replies to Tom Spurgeon’s interview questions over at the Comics Reporter. If you can find all five (or are there more?), I will reward you with a look of embarrassed panic.

[UPDATE: To paraphrase General Petraeus, the Spurge is working — and the mistake I allude to in the headline of this post has now been fixed. No more freebies in this contest.)