Roy Thomas has used the PS Artbooks to gather up material which otherwise would never see the light of day again, lost forever in the dusty back issue boxes of decades long gone.
Captain Science ain't a great comic book by any means, but inspired by the more famous Captain Video, it's a joyous glimpse of a time and place when comics were simple yarns of adventure and low-grade thrills.
The artists are names like Gustav Shrotter, Walter Johnson, Tex Blaisdell, Rocke Mastroserio and Bill Molno -- not exactly the most famous or revered artists in the field though many are quite competent. A few issues of this run were by Joe Orlando and Wally Wood, which is why they still resonate, but thanks to those famous talents we get a glimpse at other work of the day in this collection and many others across the years. These aren't great stories, but for folks who like this genre, they are fun.
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This really was a decisive point in Wood's development. Someone should do a book on just the material he and Orlando did at Avon. Space Detective is really beautiful, and one of my all-time favorites is The Mask of Fu Manchu. I've never seen a really decent quality reprint of any of it, outside of IW, which had the original metal plates. The style that coalesced is just, in my view, quintessential comics.
ReplyDeleteThere is an energy to the work of this period which eludes Wood's stuff in later days when he became more about the surface features of his work and less about the innate storytelling. It's no doubt the influence of Orlando, but it shows that the synthesis of the two is amazing to behold.
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