Beginning today is the first month of installments for Lee Falk's MANDRAKE THE MAGICIAN. "The Garden of Wuzzu" was Mandrake's 26th Sunday serial story and ran for 17 weeks from January 30, 1944 through May 21, 1944.
Created by Falk, the syndicated comic's first published strip was on June 11, 1934, preceding THE PHANTOM by almost two years. Some comics historians say that Mandrake is the first superhero and fits the two basic requirements: 1) he has super-powers and, 2) he fights criminals and evil-doers.
Falk handed the art chores over to Phil Davis and Davis drew the strip until his death in 1964. The strip was syndicated by William Randolph Hearst's King Features among whose properties included Popeye, Flash Gordon, Blondie and Jungle Jim.
BONUS! In December 1951, Harvey Comics had a special issue devoted to Mandrake in their HARVEY HITS title (#53), Accompanying the two stories is this pinup with art attributed to Al Avison (who must have taken a brief time-out from illustrating Harvey's Pre-Code horror comics). Also shown is the preliminary line-work and color-model, hand-colored by the artist.
Some...say that Mandrake is the first superhero and fits the two basic requirements: 1) he has super-powers and, 2) he fights criminals and evil-doers.
ReplyDeleteAnd some (me) say that criteria applies to the aforementioned Popeye, who debuted five years before Mandrake.
Hard to argue with that using the same criteria. The same could be said with the later version of Felix the Cat with his "magic bag of tricks" and other gimmicks he used, but he's not considered a superhero as well. I'm not going to try and guess why Popeye is overlooked.
ReplyDeleteI was going to nominate Popeye as well, but I see was beaten to the punch. I feel the "Stang".
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