I'm working on a database to identify some of the lesser known artists that worked out of the Iger shop or did free-lance work for them. I have a few publications by Al Dellinges and Jayson Disbrow which are very helpful. As many fiction house stories were group projects, the identity of the artists is blurred. If there are any scholars out there who have detailed information about people like Lebieck,Isip,Chambers, Walker, Gabrielle, or Box. I 'd appreciate your sharing it. There are also artists who used alternate names like John Martin who called himself Astarita. If you know the secret identity of Courtney Thomason or others, please reveal it. Anyone have copies of Jerry Bails Who's Who of American Comic Books? The database will be available to DCM when finished
This is not an easy subject to study and I wish you the best of luck. A couple of things:
1. It's obvious when you refer to "box" and "John Martin" that you've had access to old copies of Henry Steele's Fiction House index. This was done in the 1940s/50s AS THE BOOKS WERE BEING PUBLISHED and contain a lot of assumptions, "nicknames" and outright errors.
2. ALL of the GCD Fiction House titles that were updated by Steele, Ware and Vadeboncoeur contain information and IDs that totally supersede any information that was published prior to 2008. There is no "box" - and oddly enough the artist to whom Henry Steele was referring turned out to be named Richard Case.
3. There is no artist named "John Martin" that has ever been found. The original attribution of Martin as an Astarita penname is false. There was an Italian artist named Enrico Bagnoli who worked for Fiction House (not Iger Shop) from Italy who later on signed a couple of St. John stories with an "M" and then as "Martin" who bore some resemblance to Raphael Astarita and that might have caused the mixup.
4. "Lebieck" was Henry Steele's misreading of one Fiction House signature by Al Gabrielle. Any "research" that lists "Box", "John Martin" and "Lebieck" is fatally flawed and outdated.
5. There are three VERY DISTINCT phases of the Iger Shop: post-Eisner (late-39 to 1943), distinct, yet anonymous (1944 to 1947), indistinct and homogenous (1948-1955). Very few artists overlapped these phases and by the time the third phase arrives, it's nearly impossible to find any Iger Shop story that is distinctly the work of only one or two artists.
6. The on-line Who's Who supersedes the paper editions published in the 1970s. Going BACK to those will only inject more erroneous/out-of-date information into your research project, although Hames Ware's long study of "The Shops" that appears in the fourth volume is still worthy of note.
7. Dellinges primarily repeated information from the original Steele lists and is probably very much useless by now. I have never given much credence to Disbrow's efforts as most of what he recounts occurred BEFORE he was at the shop and is pure hear-say and second or third-hand. You need to learn the styles of the artists and attack the topic from the primary sources. Repeating or relying on what others have said twenty and thirty years ago will not lead to any new insights, but rather will cement in place all the errors and misconceptions of the past.
As I said, best of luck. You're following in the footsteps of a lot of very knowledgeable folks and almost all of them have eventually been bested by the yawning maw of mediocrity that the shop ended up as.
Peace, Jim (|:{>
