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Post by Cei-U! on Apr 30, 2020 10:24:03 GMT -5
It was an editor who got Fox into the business in the first place. DC (and later Columbia and Magazine Enterprises) editor Vin Sullivan, an old friend from high school, gave Fox his first assignment, dialoguing Fred Guardineer's Zatara and Pep Morgan stories in Action Comics (Sullivan liked Guardineer's visual storytelling but not his writing).
Cei-U!
I summon the good connections!
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Post by electricmastro on Apr 30, 2020 11:56:53 GMT -5
Drawing of Gardner Fox’s face from Strange Adventures #140 (May, 1962), done around the same time as Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s cameos from Fantastic Four #10.  |
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Post by MDG on Apr 30, 2020 12:07:33 GMT -5
^^^ The other guy is Julie Schwartz. Sid Greene always drew him into his stories.
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Post by Icctrombone on Apr 30, 2020 12:11:23 GMT -5
^^^ The other guy is Julie Schwartz. Sid Greene always drew him into his stories. I didn't recognize Schwartz because there wasn't a woman sitting on his lap... |
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Post by electricmastro on Apr 30, 2020 12:49:07 GMT -5
^^^ The other guy is Julie Schwartz. Sid Greene always drew him into his stories. I didn't recognize Schwartz because there wasn't a woman sitting on his lap... He and Fox are also shown in the one-shot Fifty Who Made DC Great (1985):   |
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Post by profh0011 on Apr 30, 2020 23:57:04 GMT -5
"go off on a different track"
The best examnple I can think of is The Human Torch. Try as I might, I've NEVER really liked even a single story about the original android character. But I find the early-60s JOHNNY STORM series in STRANGE TALES to be a lot of fun.
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Post by Rob Allen on May 1, 2020 15:26:16 GMT -5
A couple of things: - I've read, don't recall where, that Julius Schwartz used to heavily edit Gardner Fox's scripts, but usually left John Broome's scripts alone. One notorious example: a Fox JLA script circa 1967 had Wonder Woman deliver a long explanation at some point in the story. This was at the height of the TV-fueled Batmania craze, and Schwartz was trying to play up Batman's role in the JLA. He put Batman front-and-center on a lot of covers in that era. Anyway, he switched the explanatory speech from Wonder Woman to Batman - but he didn't change a single word of the speech. The idea of different characters having different speech patterns apparently wasn't a thing with him. - I just spent a few minutes with GCD Advanced Search. Fox's last regular DC script was published in March 1969. His Kothar the Barbarian novels were published 1969-70. In the years 1970-74 he had 22 stories published at Marvel, 12 at Warren, and 11 at Skywald. There was also a long Adam Strange story in prose in a DC book in 1973, but that may have been on the shelf for a while. After his last Marvel work came out in January 1974, Gardner Fox was out of comics until two scripts for fledgling publisher Eclipse Comics in 1986 shortly before his death. - Two of his Skywald stories are particularly interesting. Both of them look like they could have been the debut of an ongoing series, but neither character appeared a second time. The first story - well, it was done first but published later - is a John Carter-esque sword-and-planet story called "The Swordsman of Sarn", drawn by Jack Katz of First Kingdom fame and inked by the ubiquitous Vince Colletta. It was slated for publication in September 1971, the same month as Conan the Barbarian #9, and half a year before Marvel's "Gullivar Jones, Warrior of Mars" (March 1972) and DC's "John Carter" backups in Tarzan (April 1972). But the publisher cancelled that magazine at the last minute. The story finally came out in Psycho #12, May 1973, the same month as Conan #26, several months after the end of the Gullivar Jones series (Jan '73), and just a few months before DC's last John Carter story (Oct '73). The competitive landscape changed a lot in a few years. Anyway, here's the splash:  The second story is a horror/good girl art story published in Psycho #7, July 1972. The character Demona has an extraterrestrial background, like Vampirella who debuted almost three years earlier (Sept 1969). It was drawn by Steve Englehart - yes, that Steve Englehart - and inked by Vince Colletta. This was Steve's last published work as an artist; he joined Marvel's editorial staff around this time. Here's what Steve could do with a pencil. This two-page scan is from my personal copy.  |
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Post by berkley on May 1, 2020 15:44:52 GMT -5
I like the looks of both of those.
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Post by electricmastro on May 13, 2020 19:36:57 GMT -5
Fox was also the sole writer on Columbia's Big Shot Comics for the title's first 3-and-a-half years, co-creating Skyman, The Face, and comics' first Islamic super-hero, Raja the Arabian Knight. There is some question about his involvement in the co-creation of Starman, as artist Jack Burnley once credited Murray Boltinoff with coming up with the character. Fox was also responsible for the many changes made to The Spectre in the second half of his Golden Age series, including adding the obnoxious Percival Popp the Super-Cop to the cast. Nobody's batting average is perfect. And yes, chadwilliam, Bill Finger almost certainly scripted that first 2-page Batman origin sequence. Cei-U! I summon the titan of yesteryear! Speaking of Skyman, Fox also wrote at least one issue (Big Shot #71, November 1946) involving Skyman going to the moon. Fox did always seem particularly fascinated with the concept of traveling to the moon.  |
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Post by earl on May 13, 2020 20:18:39 GMT -5
I know that Roy Thomas adapted one of his novels as a Conan story, maybe two in the early run of the series. Can't remember the exact story off my head, but I read it within the last few months.
I seem to recall that Gardner Fox wrote a couple of early issues of Tomb of Dracula, which might be some of his last comic work.
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Post by electricmastro on May 17, 2020 23:32:35 GMT -5
Fox also helped introduce Atlantis into the DC Universe years before Aquaman came around, because he included it in Action Comics #18 (November, 1939) in the Zatara feature.  |
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