Stan Campbell: A Golden Age Case Study

When we think of the Golden Age of comics, we tend to think of the first generation of superheroes, beginning with Superman in 1938. The end of this era is disputed but it definitely has something to do with the 1954 Senate Hearings and the self-implementation of the Comics Code Authority. Here are some basic things everyone should know about the Golden Age: At their height in 50s, comics were a mass medium. Titles had circulation in the millions, and nearly every child and G.I. read comics regularly. Also, there was a tremendous diversity in genres. There were many, many people toiling anonymously or near anonymously to create comics because the profession was held in such low regard. Comics drew from pulp magazines, and have always been closely tied to radio and television. Comics were youth culture long before Rock n’ Roll gyrated its way into caucasian pelvises. Anyway, here’s a page of comics, don’t bother reading it, just kinda bounce around the pictures.

Isn’t there, well… something about the art? Look at that guy in the bottom left, what a mug! I was reading a lot of crime comics in research for my Golden Age project (more on that soon, I promise!) and I came across the above story in Crime and Justice #18 with a credit of “Stan Campbell.” Now, it was probably just a credit for the pencils, but in the Golden Age, some artists did everything short of production — Fletcher Hanks wrote, penciled, lettered, and inked (and maybe did the color separations?) for a whole book every month! So, I started looking for Stan Campbell stuff, and …

Holy Cripes! I found this awesome excerpt of Space Western on Flickr. Go ahead and read it, I’ll wait. Both Space Western and Crime and Justice were published by Charlton — which was often considered the lowest paying and often worst quality publisher — but there is a big difference in the pacing and tone between the two stories. I googled Space Western and found two free Space Westerns to download, which can easily be read with the free program Simple Comics. Now I was in pretty deep. Besides the faces, illustration like in the panel above threw me for a loop. WHO WAS THIS GUY??!!

Here’s the thing about many Golden Age creators, there is absolutely no biographic information available. To be fair, all of this digging has been on the internet, and I haven’t had time to start digging deep into Charlton, but it seems that Stan Campbell exists only as “penciller” in the history of comics. I DID find this great resource, which seems to be the best listing of everything that he worked or could have worked on. At this point I began downloading things from this list, and I came across this issue of Dell’s showcase title Four Color featuring Mandrake the Magician. This issue came out in 1956, after the Code had thinned the herd and only the non-controversial titles that employed Campbell were left. Here, in Four Color, Campbell had a whole 36 pages to tell just two stories. Crime and Justice #18 had packed in four! Take your time to read these two pages, clicking to magnify:

Now, I know it’s not perfect, but Damn! There is some great cartooning here! Campbell may not be an advanced draftsman, but I think his caricature/figure drawing is excellent, as well as his contrast of background and foreground elements. I mean, just look at that spotlight hypnosis on the first page! His clarity and style remind me of other greats from his time, such as Basil Wolverton and Burne Hogarth. So, are you sold? Do you want to see more of Stan Campbell? Well, you can’t. There’s nowhere you can buy Campbell’s work. However, I’m confident that eventually someone will publish a reprint of every single thing that Stan Campbell drew.

Special thanks to Steve Bissette for background info on the Golden Age through his Survey of the Drawn Story class. All images © Charlton and Dell comics. Some of these might be public domain but these are all just used for review anyway.

“I Come From Space to Mate” Part 2

Here’s the second and final installment of my story, “I Came From Space to Mate.” Part 1 is the previous post, but can also be found here. I’ll have updates on the second printing soon, but you can still vote in my poll if you want to anonymously tell me you’re interested in buying the anthology this is from, Nymphonomena, A Retrospective.

Thanks for reading!

“I Come From Space to Mate” Part 1

Here it is, at long last. The first half of my ten page story in Nymphonomena, A Retrospective. I’ve added color to the tones just for your online reading pleasure. Click to make the pages bigger. Just to remind you, the anthology is a full 52 pages of black and white glory, and it will be available soon. I’m still trying to gauge interest, so vote in the continuing poll at the bottom.

More coming soon! Here’s the poll if you’re interested in buying the anthology this comes from.

Introducing Nymphonomena, A Retrospective

Since before Thanksgiving, I’ve been working on an anthology with three of my Center for Cartoon Studies classmates. I designed the book and Pat Barrett did the cover. Each story is based around a 70s cult film called Nymphonomena. In the movie, a Supreme Love Being named Paradisa crash lands near a farm boy named Tracy Girdle. No one touched by her Gender Ray is ever the same again! The book has been called “awesome!” “cool!” and “whoa.”

At 52 black and white pages with screen-printed covers, I’m extremely proud of the finished product. There’s an awesome diversity here, including some sincerely hilarious jokes and easter eggs. We printed a small first run, mostly for class. Now we want to do a larger run and get this out to the larger audience it deserves. I’m thinking of charging five dollars a copy, and three dollars if you want me to send it to you. A small warning, I don’t know the next time I’ll be in any east coast city with one of these, so it may take a couple months if you don’t want to pay the shipping. Here’s an easy poll for me to gauge interest. I will also be posting a color version of my story from the book on this blog in two parts.

Diary Comic: Hotdoggin’ It

and…

‘Nuff said. Zach: “You should quote me as saying that this is really good root beer. Then you should have a montage of you eating a hotdog.” Check and check.

NaGraNoWriMo and Recent Ruminations on Comics

Tonight at the Center for Cartoon Studies there was a gallery event celebrating new books by two CCSers. Both Ken Dahl and Colleen Frakes have received multiple indy comics awards, and their books — Monsters and Woman King, respectively — are quick, square, 2×2 panel books with real ISBN numbers. They are very different, but they are both very good “graphic novels.”

Recently, Frakes has set about doing something quite different. This last month, Frakes did her own version of National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. Frakes’ NaGraNoWriMo charges the participant with doing a one hundred page graphic novel between the first and thirty-first of November.

Frakes has since completed her own challenge, and the result is called The Trails of Sir Christopher. It is available in its entirety for free on Flickr, and it is as lively and expressive as the Woman King.

Sir Christopher exemplifies many things I have been thinking about in terms of comics recently. While Frakes is clearly quite capable with a brush, the drawings she has done in this last month were rendered quickly with only a cheap felt pen and on copy paper. Materials wise, I think that an artist should generally use what he thinks will give him the best results, but the most important thing about making comics is actually making comics, and no tool or material (or lack of tool or material) should become a barrier between the ideas and the page.

This book is surprising, and fun, and not the plotless chaos one expects from a writing experiment. However, the most impressive part of this work for me is the sheer number of pages completed on each day. Surely Frakes could and should reproduce this work as a zine, a book, or something else, but for now I’m enjoying it in its current blissful state as a flickr album. Clear, free, and inspiring. Read it already.

Images for review purposes courtesy of Colleen Frakes, from the online graphic novel The Trails of Sir Christopher.