Monday, September 20, 2010

CRIME ON THE RUN! Name the mystery artists!

Today's vintage comics stories both come from St. John's Crime On the Run -- also known as Approved Comics #8 from 1954. I don't know about you, but I think the former is a catchier title than the latter!

I can find no credits for the artists involved here, and am not 100% certain I can ID them properly, so I'm calling on you blog readers to offer your informed opinions. Who painted the cover? Not a clue. Is A Tough Beat the work of Jim Mooney, as my fellow cartoonist George Freeman suggests? Looks like a good call to me. But do you think otherwise?

And who drew Kill-Crazy John Dillinger? Dan Spiegle? Gray Morrow? Lou Fine in Peter Scratch (his great, though short-lived private eye strip) mode? If you know for certain -- or even have a crazy guess -- please chime in and leave a comment.

I have to say that reading/skimming through all the old comics scans available on the web, has me wishing we had some genre (or multi-genre) short story comics anthologies being published these days. I'd love to pick up a monthly magazine and see a combo of new and vintage crime, western, horror and humor stories by the best of today's and yesterday's cartoonists. Come on, publishers, how about it....?

As usual, these scans have been cleaned up consderably for posting here.













4 comments:

Booksteve said...

First one looks like William Overgaard.

Parts of the second one remind me of Norman Maurer's seventies DC war stories but overall I don't really think it's him. Maybe he kibbutzed a bit with it though.

Booksteve said...

Nope. I take it back. The more I look at that first story, I'm convinced that it is Jim Mooney but maybe with better inking than normal...possibly by Overgaard?

--steve cohen said...

i agree for sure on Jim Mooney on the first one, the poses and attitude of the c`hracters suggest that, sorry, no idea on the second one.

benton jew said...

Hmmmmm.... First story doesn't look like Mooney to me ( though I'm not as familiar with his earlier work ). It does have a familiar feel to me though. The second story is pretty unusual for '54. Photo realism wasn't very common in comic books then. Wouldn't hit for a couple of years. Definitely not Dan Speigel. Fine and Morrow wouldn't get "realistic" for another couple of years. Based on his work I've seen in '54 on "Outlaw Kid", there is a possiblity that this is the work of Doug Wildey.