Tuesday, April 19, 2016

The Boys from Derby: "Satan's Pools" by Gill and Boyette

Dig it, Groove-ophiles! Ol' Groove chanced upon the sensational sixteenth issue of Ghost Manor (October 1973) and was struck by Joe Gill and Pat Boyette's "Satan's Pools". The story is a good mysterious pot-boiler, fun and dependable. Joe Gill was great at these kinds of stories. That wasn't what turned Ol' Groove on, though. No, what I really dig is how artist Pat Boyette handled the telling of this tale artistically. Don't ya just love the "wide-screen" style he used here? It feels like Mr. Boyette was going for a Sunday newspaper funnies look here. Had anyone ever done this in a regular comic before?  I remember seeing this format used later in Warren mags, usually by Alex Nino (including the stories published by Pacific in Bill DuBay's Bold Adventures). Of course there's the famous John Byrne Fantastic Four issue of the early 80s (ish 252). Anyone remember seeing this style before or during the Groovy Age? (I don't think Marvel's British reprints count...but I could be swayed with a good argument.) Enjoy!











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4 comments:

  1. mneunderApril 19, 2016 at 10:37 AM

    Nick Caputo reported an earlier case of Boyette doing this:
    In "Love Thy Neighbor!" Pat Boyette decided to illustrate the Joe Gill script horizontally instead of with traditional vertical panels. Ghostly Tales # 106, August 1973.
    http://nick-caputo.blogspot.com/2015_01_01_archive.html?m=1
    (the whole post is excellent, by the way)

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  2. mneunderApril 21, 2016 at 11:42 AM

    I just remembered another horizontal story by Charlton: Billy the Kid #115 (December 1975), "Killer's Return", by Fred Himes, an Apache Red story.

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  3. The Groovy AgentApril 21, 2016 at 9:17 PM

    I'll have to track these down and use them in the future! Thanks, Groove-ophiles!

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  4. dusty abellApril 21, 2016 at 9:20 PM

    Great observation...why do i have such a strong attraction to Pat Boyettes art, theres something very appealing about it to me..............I have to check if you've profiled his turn on The Tarantula from Atlas/Seaboard yet, thats my first exposure to his work and I remember being captivated by it still all these years later...........

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Special thanks to Mike's Amazing World of Comics and Grand Comics Database for being such fantastic resources for covers, dates, creator info, etc. Thou art treasures true!


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