The lead story, "Hamilton's Creature" is introduced by Rod Serling in the fashion of the typical comic book host and is about a scientist on the trail of a very different kind of Yeti. It is scripted by Dick Wood and illustrated by Fred Fredericks. Fredericks inked five years of Lee Falk's THE PHANTOM comic strip and also drew the MANDRAKE THE MAGICIAN strip from 1965 until Falk's death in 1999, after which he both wrote and drew the strip until he retired in 2013. Dick Wood was a prolific script writer who began his career in 1939 at Funnies, Inc., a comic book packaging outfit similar to The Iger Shop (one of their titles was the legendary MARVEL COMICS #1). He then went on to Centaur in 1940, then a long stint between DC, Lev Gleason, Hillman and Quality before hiring on at Western/Gold Key, writing stories for DOCTOR SOLAR, MAN OF THE ATOM, BORIS KARLOFF TALES OF MYSTERY and THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E., among numerous others.
The second story, "The Night Striker of Paris" was written by Dick Wood and drawn by veteran Gold Key and Dell artist Mel Crawford. Oddly, there was no intro by Serling, possibly because it was used as a non-TZ filler. In any event, the story was weak -- even to my young brain -- and involves a Paris police inspector on the trail of a nighttime thief that ends with a bit of a twist.
The issue closes out with "Iron Man No. 1", a kooky but fun story about a robot who is "brought to life" and, after the curiosity wears off with the people in the neighborhood, is forced to go elsewhere to find some peace and quiet. The story is written by Paul S. Newman (no relation to Paul the actor) who, during his long career, wrote everything from humor-to romance-to westerns and most everything in between, as well as newspaper comic strips, including decades-long runs on THE LONE RANGER and TUROK, SON OF STONE. Prolific is an understatement -- Paul is in THE GUINNESS BOOK OF WORLD RECORDS for having written the most-ever comic book stories -- 4,100 -- for a total of 36,000 pages! The artist on this story was Dick Rockwell. No slouch himself, he drew for Lev Gleason, Hillman, Fiction House, Quality and Marvel among many others over his career, not to mention ghosting for Milton Caniff's STEVE CANYON (you can see the Caniff influence in the panel below).
Well, there you have it, a walk with me down memory lane with my first two monster comics. And do you really have to ask me if I still have them? What do you think?
With The "first" IRON-MAN ! Excellent !!!
ReplyDeleteMarvel's Iron Man was introduced a couple years earlier but I never heard of Marvel giving Gold Key any problem for using the name. Ozzie Osbourne and Geezer Butler also claimed that they did not use Marvel's comic as inspiration for their song -- they first called it "Iron Bloke"!
ReplyDeleteThe two things that always made Gold Key comics stand out to me were: 1) those gorgeous painted covers, and: 2) those gorgeous painted covers reproduced without "trade dress" on the back cover as a "pin-up".
ReplyDelete(Though I wish they'd have left the "pin-up" blurb off it and printed the art *completely* text-free.)
I wonder how what percentage of old copies of Gold Key comics are missing their back covers?
-- hsc
They were lucky to have George Wilson working for them for so long. His cover art is outstanding. Except for cutting up duplicate copies of FM and monster cards for my own home-made monster mags, I luckily pretty much left everything else intact. From what I can tell, TZ #8 was the last issue with the pin-up on the back cover.
ReplyDelete