Hey, just for fun, here's Wayne Howard's cover for this tale's first appearance in Ghostly Tales...wonder why Woody acolyte Howard didn't finish/ink "The Anywhere Machine!"? Hmmmmmm...
Thursday, January 7, 2016
The Boys from Derby: "The Anywhere Machine!" by Cuti, Wood, and Sutton
Dig it, Groove-ophiles! A rare Wally Wood job for Charlton! Though Woody only provided layouts for writer Nick Cuti's "The Anywhere Machine!", his hand is pretty evident. Yeah, Tom Sutton's art is radically different from Wood's, but Wally's staging, machinery, and aliens survived (and sometimes thrived) under Sutton's radically different finishes/inks. Makes for a very visually interesting piece (to say the least), don'tcha think? The following scans are from Space War #30 (March 1978), but the story first appeared in Ghostly Tales #107 (August 1973)...
Hey, just for fun, here's Wayne Howard's cover for this tale's first appearance in Ghostly Tales...wonder why Woody acolyte Howard didn't finish/ink "The Anywhere Machine!"? Hmmmmmm...
Hey, just for fun, here's Wayne Howard's cover for this tale's first appearance in Ghostly Tales...wonder why Woody acolyte Howard didn't finish/ink "The Anywhere Machine!"? Hmmmmmm...
If I'm remembering this correctly, Wood's layouts originally went to Sid Check, who had worked with Wood in the 50's and was trying to get back into comics. There's a nice groovy age reprint of a Check tale in Weird Wonder Tales #1. Check's finishes were so much of a disaster that the story was given to Sutton to redraw, probably not actually over Wood, but still using his compositions. The idea of any story being redrawn for notoriously cheap and editorially disinterested Charlton has to be an anomaly. George Wildman may have had standards, but the guys with the money didn't really care as long as pages were filled. It allowed for some wonderful experimentation (up to the point where the sales reports came in.)
ReplyDeleteThanks for posting this really cool story! Cuti, Wood and Sutton - very nice stuff from all of them. I always thought the cover was by Dan Adkins - I certainly do not see very much Wayne Howard there.
ReplyDeleteThe 3 adventurers of the first strip remind me of Flash Gordon, Dale Arden & Dr Zarkov :O.
ReplyDeleteThanks a lot for your work & happy groovy new year
but it's never explained how Dr. Koenig got turned into a monkey---or how Janus turned out to be Satan himself. Do you have any theories?
ReplyDeleteWell, apparently Dr. Koenig accidentally transported himself to Hell. You go to hell, you meet Satan. Satan wants souls.
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