The Bernstein Black Rider

Some of Robert Bernstein's scripts for the costumed Western hero Black Rider at Timely/Atlas are credited—artist Jay Scott Pike added Bernstein's name when he signed his art. (Ernie Hart's Fifties writing credits also come from Pike's adding the scripter's name.) However, Pike didn't credit all of Bernstein's scripts on his stories, and there were other artists who didn't go to that trouble.

Black Rider was suspended with #18, and when it returned almost two years later there was a new writer, whose distinctive gunshots—"Whram"—don't identify him but show him as the main writer of Kid Colt at the time too.

Black Rider Written by Robert Bernstein

Jan/51	12	The Town That Vanished
		Marked for Murder
		Trek of Terror
		Hot Lead Reunion
		Six-Gun Salute
Mar/	13	The Terrified Tribe
		The Deadly Double-Cross
		The Secret in the Sand
		The Strange Man
May/	14	The Horror Castle
		The Tree Pirates Strike
		Close Shave
		The Metal Menace
Jul/	15	The Poiusoned Bottles
		The Silent Scream
		The Sign of the Wolf
		Returns from the Dead
Sep/	16	Dear Black Rider...
		Three-Cornered Feud
		Mass Murder in Montana
Nov/	17	Black Rider's Vengeance
		Mirror of Death	[credited]
		The Biggest Liar in Tombstone
		The Ghost on Four Legs	[credited]
Jan/52	18	The Indian with Two Hearts	[credited]
		Tombstone Termites	[credited]
		The Ferry at Killer's Creek	[credited]

in Two-Gun Western

Apr/52	13	Doomsday Gang	[credited]
Jun/	14	The Mountain of Doom	[credited]

in Wild Western

Feb/51	14	The Day Black Rider Died
Apr/	15	The Man Who Died Twice
Jun/	16	The Texas Tigress
Aug/	17	Brand of Terror
Oct/	18	The Murderers of Crippled Bend	[credited]
Dec/	19	Vultures of the Rio Grande	[credited]

3 Villains of Doom's Stories Adapted

In the 1966 novel Batman vs. 3 Villains of Doom the Penguin, the Joker, and Catwoman vie for the Academy Award of crime, a golden machine gun: the Tommy. DC in the person of E. Nelson Bridwell considered the novel canon, mentioning the Tommy in a World's Finest letter column.

Although William Woolfolk (as Winston Lyon) certainly followed the Batman TV show in the details—Robin's "Holy" exclamations, Chief O'Hara, the bust of Shakespeare—the three villains' schemes are adapted from comic book stories. (And the Catwoman is wearing her comic-book costume, with its full-head mask and green cape.)

Once I recognized the stories' sources from their synopses in the Batman volume of Michael Fleisher's Encyclopedia of Comic Book Heroes, I assumed they must have been written by Woolfolk—having seen pages of a few of his scripts in fanzines, I thought he might have kept them on hand. Evidently not, at least in this case; once I saw the stories themselves, I changed my opinion. Copies of these stories must have been pulled from the files and sent along to him by DC.

Stories Adapted in Batman vs. 3 Villains of Doom

Apr-May/50	Batman #58	The State-Bird Crimes	w: Edmond Hamilton
June/47	Det #124	The Crime Parade	w: Hamilton
Apr/47	Det #122	The Black Cat Crimes	w: Hamilton?

A Ghost for John Severin

On my posts about Sal Trapani's ghost pencillers, I figured he knew most of them from their working together at Charlton. I suspected the same sort of thing applied with John Severin's finding a ghost for this story from Cracked 70 (Aug/68). "Snow Flake and the Seven Dwarfs" is signed only "Severin" in his handwriting, and only the regular Cracked artists are listed in the masthead. I wondered where he could have known this artist from, and figured it must have been when he was drawing at EC; this penciller was the colorist there.

All kidding aside, Marie Severin would have her pencils inked by her brother, with both credited for the first time, a couple of years later at Marvel on Kull the Conqueror. There may be more examples of this ghosting at Cracked, but an awful lot of its issues are hard to come by nowadays.

A Curt Swan Crime Story with a Tiny Difference

Curt Swan was a mainstay at DC for some four decades. Along with his superhero and war strips for them in the early Fifties, Curt Swan worked on the company's Gangbusters and other crime features.

But this Swan-pencilled story, "Killer at Large," was published in Crime Cases 25 (Nov/50)—from Timely/Atlas/Marvel.

Sub-Mariner Artist Draws David Bruce Banner's Lookalike

If at first you don't succeed in identifying an artist on a comic book, keep on looking at other comics, and maybe when you go back to that first one you'll have run across some clue and a light bulb will go on.

The Courtship of Eddie's Father (2 issues, Jan/70 and May/70),  a TV tie-in from Dell, stumped me and others. The best I could come up with was that the artist wasn't Jack Sparling.

In the time since, I IDed the artist on a DC romance story by some girls' faces—

—comparing here from my July 9, 2015 post a page from "Two Hearts on a Tree" in Secret Hearts 121 (July/67) with a tier from Carl Pfeufer's known work on Super Green Beret 1 (June/67) at Milson.

Who was expecting Carl Pfeufer at Dell, 1970? He drew all the stories in the two issues of The Courtship of Eddie's Father; D. J. Arneson wrote them.

Suuuuper Realism (Comparatively) on Ricky Nelson

Pete Alvarado strayed over from animated-style comics (I associate him best with Andy Panda and Charlie Chicken among the many, many features he did) to pencil, and for all I know ink, the first issue of Dell's Ricky Nelson (Four Color 956, Dec/58) spinning off from the TV sitcom "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet." Russ Manning drew the fourth issue, and in between--who knows?

The best way to recognize an artist's work when he may be trying to match the models in a tie-in is to look at secondary characters--note the soda jerk Sam here. Still, Alvarado's characteristic finger shapes and arm positioning do show up at times on Ricky, as in the first panel here. The silhouette in the final panel is also a giveaway.

Alvarado would do Dell's first three issues of The Three Stooges in a style closer to animation cartooning, even though Moe, Larry, and Curly Joe are as "real" as Ricky Nelson.

Norm DiPluhm: D. J. Arneson

After the nom de plume "Norm DiPluhm" at Charlton was attributed by fans to Steve Skeates, he spent years explaining that it wasn't him.

Rip Jagger's recent post on his blog about DiPluhm's Phantom stories reminded me of who the writer really is—the splash page to "Skyjack" that Rip uses as his illustration has the Ghost Who Walks saying "Great Scot" with one "t" rather than the more common "Great Scott." That and other markers unlike Skeates' identify the writer as D. J. Arneson. (He also wrote as DiPluhm for Go-Go and Abbott and Costello, two titles Skeates worked on, which may help explain those fans' thought processes). This example is from "The Giant Ape of Thawth."

Phantom stories written by D. J. Arneson
* = credited (as "Norm DiPluhm")

Aug/69	33	The Phantom's Death
Oct/	34	The Cliff Kingdom	*
		The Giant Ape of Tawth
Feb/70	36	The River That Never Ends	*
		Very Special Timber	*
Apr/	37	Bandar Betrayers	*
		Skyjack	*
		Disband the Patrol!	*
Jun/	38	The Dying Ground	*
		The Phantom's New Faith
		The Trap

That's the entirety of Arneson's Phantom stories. On Ghostly Tales here are the stories that jumped out at me in flipping through the entire run for my own indexing; there may be a few more.

Ghostly Tales by Arneson
* = credited (as "DiPluhm")

Oct/67	63	Up on the Mountain
Feb/68	65	The Phantom Crew	*
May/	66	Water, Water, Everywhere	*
Sept/	68	Yo Ho Ho and a Dead Man's Jest
Nov/	70	Pop Goes Popolos