Here are some delightful covers for early issues of Magic Comics co-featuring two very different comic strip characters -- Carl Anderson's Henry and Lee Falk's Mandrake the Magician. Two comics could hardly be more different in style and tone than these two but here we see cover artist Joe Musial (who was born on this day by the way) make them work in tandem somehow.
Utterly charming!
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Mandrake is so iconic.There must have been at least a dozen Mandrake ripoffs in the early years of comics. He;s appeared in one form or another in Little Annie Fanny, underground comics and Alain Resnais films. And yet he is mostly unknown these days.
ReplyDeleteIf you haven't already picked it up, I recommend The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana by Umberto Eco, a sort of fictionalized journey through the author's childhood reading material in Mussolini's Italy (though there's much more to it than that). It's full of great illustrations; Mandrake, Flash Gordon and the Dragon Lady are all there, as well as early pulps like Fantomas and Nick Carter, plus a lot of fascinating and lurid stuff I'd never seen before.
I still have the Pacific Comics Club facsimile reprints of three Mandrake Feature Books and there is a dreamlike mystique to his first adventures that has been hard to capture since..
I need to read more Mandrake. I have very little of it alas. I'm very intrigued by the Eco novel you mention. I was no t aware of it. I'll have to check it out...literally.
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