ATLANTIC CROSSING - PART ONE

In case anyone was wondering about absence of posts over the last couple of weeks, the reason is that I was away travelling overseas. By coincidence, my travels included two major comics cities of America so I thought I might very well spend some of my free time there doing what people don’t normally do and try to see some of the buildings that used to house major publishers of comic books in the USA. Today Google Street View offers anyone who cares a possibility to see everything online but I thought taking a glance first-hand would be more fun. In an ideal World some smart tour operator might put together a special tour for the niche market of comic book fans. And get a dozen or so nutters a year to sign up…

My first stop was in the fine city of New York that was home to more comic book publishers than any other place in the world. I saw a few places there.

Here is the front entrance and a couple of pictures of 330 West 42nd Street that housed executive offices of Marvel Comics in the very early days of the company from October 1939 until Summer 1942:

Ace Comics (renowned as the publisher of Ace Comics #11 with the first appearance of The Phantom, the first-ever costumed hero that led to the Golden Age of superheroes in comics, and publisher of titles like Baffling Mysteries, Super-Mystery Comics, Web of Mystery, etc., etc.) had their editorial and executive offices at 23 West 47th Street between August 1947 and June 1956. The building sits in the middle of what is now (and what has probably always been) the Diamond District in Midtown a few steps from Times Square: 

Between 1946 and July 1954 the famous Entertaining Comics, commonly known as EC Comics (publisher of Crime Suspenstories, Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror, Weird Fantasy, Mad magazine, etc.), had their editorial and executive offices at 225 Lafayette St. at the intersection with Spring, bordering Little Italy. I remember reading somewhere that the company was on the 7th floor. There is a subway station directly under the building and the posh corner entrance is to a 24-hour pharmacy. Chic interior of the pharmacy makes one think it used to be a lobby of a bank or maybe a small railway station hall. Today the building houses luxury $ 13,000 per month condominiums, some advertisements with photos can be found on the web if you google the address. Here are some pictures of the building that I took during my self-guided “tour”:

 

145 East 32nd Street became the second and permanent New York City home to Warren Publishing (Creepy, Eerie, Vampirella, etc.) when the company relocated from Philadelphia in the sixties:

My next post will include images of some important locations of the underground comix scene in San Francisco during the early seventies. I hope to resume my Shiver and Shake series soon afterwards.

1974 SHIVER & SHAKE ANNUAL

1974 SHIVER AND SHAKE ANNUAL was a thick book of 160 pages priced 70 p. Below is the summary of the contents. Again, black colour is for SHIVER section and blue is for SHAKE; underlined are the features that didn’t appear in the weeklies:

Webster (3 episodes, one in full colour),  Frankie Stein (5 episodes - 2 in colour and 3 b/w); Shiver (in full colour); Creepy Creations feature (2 instalments); Ed (5 episodes); Grimly Feendish (4 episodes, one in full colour); The Hand (2 episodes); Sweeny Toddler (2 episodes); Adrian’s Wall; The Duke’s Spook (2 episodes); Soggy the Sea Monster (2 episodes); Biddy’s Beastly Bloomers; Midnight Tales (adventure, 4 pages); Ye Haunted Lake; Ghouldilocks (2 episodes); Shake (2 episodes, both in colour); Lolly Pop; Miss Chief (3 episodes); The Desert Fox (2 episodes); Nutter (3 episodes), ; Sample Simon (2 episodes); Damsel in Distress; The Scroungers (2 episodes); Though Nutt and Softy Centre (2 episodes); Mirth Shakers feature (2 instalments); Moana Lisa; Comics College (3 episodes, one in full colour); Gal Capone; Seeing Stars feature (Horoscope); The Forest Legion (14 pages); The Fixer (2 episodes); Loopy Locations feature; The Silly Circus; Match of the Year Circus versus Panto Folk; Kids’ Court; Jail Birds; Horrornation Street; Christmas Eve at Scream Inn; The Shiver Givers.

Same as the 1973 Christmas Holiday Special, the Annual was modelled after the weeklies: the cover was split in two and there was a Shake section inside separated from Shiver with blocks of colour pages on both ends. Here is the front page of Shake:

Let’s take a peek inside. Again, all episodes of Frankie Stein were reprints of the original stories illustrated by Ken Reid in WHAM! issues 19, 2o, 22, 23 and 24, all resized from the original 1 ½ pages in WHAM! to 3 pages in the Annual, with the usual consequences (enlarged panels with awkward empty spaces, extended lines, etc.).

The Annual had two Creepy Creations with a Winter theme. In his comment to my previous post about 1973 Special Andy noted that the Christmas Creation that I showed was drawn by Bob Nixon, not Ken Reid. I believe the two in this first Annual were also by Nixon. Here is one. The face is Reid-ish, but otherwise it looks more Nixon than Reid to my eye, what do you think?

In the Christmas episode of Scream Inn Santa charmed all resident creeps so the Innkeeper had to use his cunning to scare Santa off and prevent him from winning a million pounds. Below are two important panels from the set:

Shiver got his own strip for the first time:

I won’t go into details of other regular Shiver and Shake strips from the weeklies because I hope to cover them in their dedicated posts at a later stage.  I will concentrate on those that didn’t appear in the weeklies instead, and this Annual had quite a large number of them. Ed and Midnight Tales were the only ones in the Shiver section. There’s nothing much to say about Ed. Midnight Tales was a mystery horror tale that looks like a reprint but I don’t know where from or who the illustrator was. Here are the first two pages:

Shake section had a lot more of unfamiliar entries. The Forest Legion was probably the most prominent one because it was as many as 14 pages long. It was about a crowd of goody forest animals and their efforts to stop two baddies – a crook called Boss and his assistant Butch, from robbing a loopy rich old Baron who lived in his lone castle on an island in the middle of the lake. Forest Legion later appeared in other Shiver and Shake annuals. I don’t know the artist’s name. Here are two opening pages:

Miss Chief told adventures of a Red Indian girl. The strip wasn’t sensationally original in its concept and a lot of its humour was supposed to come from the ‘pidgin English’ so well familiar to folks who read Little Plum in the Beano (such as this: … ‘Medicine man angry! Him boilum up a storm!’ … or ‘Blackfoot tribe say our Chief got smelly socks! Heap insult!’...).

Seeing Stars, a Horoscope drawn by Reg Parlett, was a nice addition to the package. Another reprint, I believe:

Kids’ Court was a feature about law enforcement in which adults faced justice at the hands of kids. It was interesting in the sense that it was a pilot episode of a strip that became a regular in Whoopee! as of 1976 and continued there for more than three years.

The remaining new features are hardly worth mentioning. Nutter was a poorly drawn strip without speech balloons about an unfortunate toothy kid. The Scroungers was about a family of … scroungers, illustrated by Phil Millar. The title of The Silly Circus also speaks for itself. Here is the whole strip as I find the artwork quite nice, although I am not sure about the artists’ name:

1973 SHIVER AND SHAKE CHRISTMAS HOLIDAY SPECIAL

The first Shiver and Shake Special was quite extraordinary because it was a CHRISTMAS Holiday Special. It had 96 pages and cost 18 p.

Here is the breakdown of the contents (black colour is for SHIVER section and blue is for SHAKE; underlined are the features that didn’t appear in the weeklies): The Duke’s Spook, Soggy the Sea Monster, Grimly Feendish (4 episodes), Ghouldilocks (3 episodes), Christmas Creations (4 instalments), Frankie Stein (5 episodes), Horrornation Street, Menace of the Ghost Ship, Scatty Bat (2 episodes), The Hand (2 episodes), Sweeny Toddler, Wiz War (2 episodes), The Shiver Givers, Shake (+ Shake’s Christmas Surprise), Mirth-Shaking Christmas Inventions (2 instalments), The Desert Fox, Damsel in Distress, Lolly Pop, Mirth Shakers (2 instalments), The Fixer, Moana Lisa, Match of the Season: Santa’s Team v Jack Frost, Tough Nutt and Softy Centre, Sample Simon, Scream Inn, Ye Haunted Lake, Ed (2 episodes) and Webster.

The Special was structured after the weeklies: it had the spook and the elephant on the front and a Creepy Creation (on this occasion – a Christmas Creation) on the back, while SHAKE section was framed by full-colour Shake strip on the front and a beautiful Shake’s Christmas Surprise on the back, also in colour. All characters were in their usual sections. Here is the front page of the Shake section:

For me, the highlights were Ken Reid’s Christmas Creations – three in full colour and one in black and white, and the 4-page Christmas set of Scream Inn (Scream Inn Welcomes Ebenezer Scrooge). Here is one of the Christmas Creations, followed by the masthead and the final panel of Scream Inn:

 

All 5 instalments of Frankie Stein were reprints of episodes of the original series in WHAM! by Ken Reid (from WHAM! issues 131, 28 (with half a page of the original episode unceremoniously chopped off), 35, 34 and 157).  

Match of the Season was a nice variation of Match of the Week. Here is the opening panel with a crowd of Shiver and Shake characters in the background:

 

A number of strips were unfamiliar to readers of the weeklies, all but one were reprints.  Menace of the Ghost Ship was a 16-page adventure thriller by Eric Bradbury that in fact was a heavily doctored reprint of Maxwell Hawke and the Ghost Ship that ran in Buster back in 1965. In the Shiver and Shake version Maxhwell Hawke the famous ghost hunter became Stirling Steel, while Hawke’s pretty assistant Jill Adair from Buster had a sex change and turned into Mark Tyme. Below are two opening pages from the Special, followed by the first episode of the original series in tabloid-size Buster dated 3rd April 1965:  

 

 

Wiz War was a reprint of the strip about two rival wizards Wizard Prang and Demon Druid that originated in POW! and continued in SMASH! 

Scatty Bat was a reprint of Batty Bat from the early Whizzer and Chips; the reprints appeared in Shiver and Shake specials and annuals but not in the weeklies.  

Ed was the only new strip but was actually a poorly drawn space-filler about a headless cavalier.

All in all, the Special made a very attractive package.