Comics
By Allen Forrest
I could smell the ink as I entered the drug store, comics! Fresh in and on the rack!
I loved the artwork, the stories, some were pretty good others pretty stupid,
but that artwork, it was, well—ART!
My time was the Silver Age, the 60's, my favorite was The Flash who's secret identity was Barry Allen the police scientist whose accident in the lab with those chemicals—wild chemicals and a lighting bolt, they turned him into The Flash. Those great comic book covers, like the one with The Flash running rings around arch villain The Top's giant atomic grenade—if he stopped running it would blow up half the Earth!
The Atom, world's smallest super hero, drawn by Gil Kane and written by Gardner Fox, who could ever forget the cover of Showcase Presents, number 34, September-October 1961, with The Atom driving a cork into a bottle containing an extraterrestrial Herculean foe—just 10 cents!
So cool, and fun and what a great escape for a kid.
To this day the artwork fascinates me.
Amazing illustrators like Steve Ditko, writers like Stan Lee with Marvel Comics and their Spiderman first starting in Fantasy No. 15. Or Strange Tales issue #110, July 1963 and introducing Doctor Strange master of black magic with his adventures in a supernatural altered reality, a real mind bender for the readers. Those colors bursting forth mysterious settings rich and provocative.
Damn it's art! It's genius and it's all changed now.
Those glorious times are past. It seems that is the way of so many things.
For the 1950s had even more amazing artwork than the 60's. The 50's illustrators were the Michelangelos of pulp, cartoonists like Jay Disbrow who's strange and contorted world would fascinate and repel us at the same time and Basil Wolverton who's drawing style was a macabre psychedelic expressionism.
These comic artists, like sci-fi writers, were never given their due, never revered for the wondrous worlds they created, except by us kids, who loved them.
Maybe it's not enough, surely never put on the same level with literature or fine art, never respected the way van Gogh or Hemingway are,
but in the comic book world, the world of us kids—they were Kings!