Thursday, September 22, 2016
The Boys from Derby: "Satana's Paradise!" by Gill and PAM
Dig it, Groove-ophiles! Another Vengeance Squad adventure (from VS #4, October 1975) comin' at ya! This is another Joe Gill/Pete (PAM) Morisi collaboration. More wordy than usual, lots of talking heads pages, and PAM's work looks a bit looser than usual, but hey--they hit their deadline (no Dreaded Deadline Doom reprints here, baby)!
Hey Groovester, I can't remember why I only bought the first two issues of Vengeance! Help??? Was it because I couldn't find the rest on the spinner?
ReplyDeleteThe real jewels of Vengeance Squad were the Cuti/Staton Mike Mauser backups. But the PAM artwork with its Tuska/Toth influence was a joy to behold; drug down slightly by the hohum Joe Gill scripts.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was getting into comic books the only books I picked up were Charltons. I remember buying every issue of Vengeance Squad I could lay my hands on. I liked the stories, which were to the point without a lot of unnecessary BS from Joe GilI. In fact, that was one of the major plusses for me to seek out Charlton comics. The stories weren't there to call attention to the writer. They were there to provide entertainment, which books like Yang, House of Yang, Doomsday +1, Korg 70,000BC, Billy the Kid as well as their ghost comics provided in spades. Sure, the writing could be nitpicked, but while I was reading the stories I didn't give a damn. The art, like much of Charlton's output, was different from the work being published by the big two. Of course, with time, I've come to see that PAM relied on the same stock poses over and over, whether out of necessity or perhaps because he didn't feel like reinventing the wheel every time he drew a story, but maybe that was part of the appeal. I don't know. I do know that to this day, I will always read a comic drawn by PAM. One more bit about PAM, it was always a shame he never got to draw a Phantom story, although he did manage a pinup.
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