Action and adventure
Action and adventure |
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Page 15 of 42  Panel from Superman, No 1 (DC Comics). Art: Joe Shuster. Script: Jerry Siegel. The hero was intended to be a composite strongman, part-Samson, part-Hercules: here he meets Lois Lane for the first time. Crime fighting was a particularly significant genre, and moved into the funny papers with Chester Gould's grim detective 'Dick Tracy' in 1931. The stories were ostensibly about a pistol-packing charmer and his battles with a roster of grotesque foes, including 'Flyface', 'Rhodent' and 'Mrs Pruneface'. However, they exhibited a new kind of hard-hitting realism dealing with contemporary themes; Gould was motivated by the crime wave during the prohibition era, and was fascinated by characters such as Al Capone and } Edgar Hoover. Pulp-writer Dashiell Hammett got into the act in 1934 with 'Secret Agent X-9', superbly illustrated in a film-noir style by Alex Raymond. Characters from the pulps were also adapted, notably Charlie Chan, the Oriental sleuth, who had already become a screen star when he was transferred to strip form by Alfred Andriola in 1938. Finally, in 1940, The Spirit by Will Eisner took the genre to new artistic heights. Concerning the hardboiled adventures of a mysterious masked crime-fighter and his black sidekick 'Ebony White', the short stories were intelligently plotted and brilliantly drawn, and had an entire pull-out supplement devoted to them.  Panel from Action Comics, (DC Comics). Art: Curt Swan. Unarguably it was Swan more than anyone else who defined Supes' square-jawed 'Charles Atlas' look for the modern period. Other landmark strips included Dan Moore and Alex Raymond's science fiction saga 'Flash Gordon' (1934), about a blond-haired 'saviour of the universe' and his conflict with galactic tyrant 'Ming the Merciless' (the strip was intended as a rival to Buck Rogers, but was artistically in a different league); Milton Caniff s 'Terry and the Pirates' (1934). about a young adventurer in China; Lee Falk and Ray Moore's 'The Phantom' (1936), who had a mask and a secret identity, and was the first comics character to dress in tights; and Hal Foster's 'Prince Valiant' (1937), a handsome-looking Arthurian romance, strong on period detail. Of course, along with the diamonds there was an awful lot of dross; but generally speaking the 1930s and 1940s are seen as the 'golden age' of adventure strips.  Cover, Action Comics (DC Comics). Art: Wayne Boring. One of the great Superman artists who originally worked as an understudy for Shuster when he was going blind. |