The Golden Dames Project

[JGray]

That is interesting. I'm sure his old contracts, though, were work for hire. Heck, even Eisner didn't own the Spirit outright, though I believe his contract was written so that it would revert to him.

From what I understand Iger and Victor Fox were both real winners when it came to personality.

[Yoc]

Oh that's for sure though I keep hearing that they were far from unique in the way they ran their companies.  Heck, from what I've read beside Donenfeld and Liebowitz they might have been almost civil in their dealings.

[JGray]

On the other hand, from what I heard "Busy" Arnold was a pretty nice and fair guy when it came to comics.

As for Golden Dames, we moved on from Betty Bates to Futura.

Commentary for Futura (from Planet Comics #43), page 1

From a Lady-at-Law we move onto a lady of the future. Our next spotlight falls squarely on a fantastic female character following squarely in the footsteps of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon.

Futura first appeared in Planet Comics #43 (cover date July 1946), published by Fiction House. Like Betty Bates, Futura's story was one part of a larger anthology book. Unlike Ms. Bates, however, Futura's story was serialized instead of a series of individual adventures. In each issue of Planet Comics, five to seven pages of Futura's story would unfold and, usually, end on a cliffhanger that promised the reader a continuation of the tale in the next issue.

A secretary in the far future (well, it was far in 1946) of the 21st century, Marcia Reynolds found herself transported to a strange planet by large headed, telepathic aliens for strange experiments. Dubbed "Futura" by her captors, Marcia escaped and led the primitive natives of the alien world in a revolt against the evil big heads.

Futura tapped heavily into the "good girl" art trend - depicting beautiful, scantily clad women in provocative poses (and often in bondage). Despite this, Futura was very much a hero and a leader. She was a capable warrior and brilliant tactician who led an army against in a guerilla war against an oppressive, technologically superior force.

[Yoc]

I will give Busy credit - he demanded quality work on his books.  There were some exchanges mentioned in the last Eisner bio I read, Will Eisner: A Dreamer's Life in Comics by Michael Schumacher, and it sounds like Arnold could be prickly but then it sounded like Eisner could give as good as he got.  He certainly handled Iger and his inflated ego.  To read the Iger bio I mentioned earlier he was calling Eisner nothing more than another hired hand at the 'Iger' studio.  HIs book also skipped the entire Fox vs DC Wonderman case (the #1 reason I read it) but did talk about a later case where Iger had to sue Fox for owed fees and won but still took more Fox business four years later when Fox returned from bankruptcy.

[JGray]

I think it is safe to say there were a lot of egos involved in the early days of comics.

Commentary from Futura (from Planet Comics #43), page 2

Strange in a Strange Land

In 1912 the pulp magazine All-Story serialized a novel called Under the Moons of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. In the story, former Confederate captain and seeming immortal John Carter is transported via astral projection to Barsoom (aka Mars) where his intelligence, wit and skill eventually win him the position of Warlord of Mars.

John Carter of Mars probably wasn't the first "stranger in a strange land". History is populated with stories of characters from the mundane world being transported to exotic and fantastic lands where they become heroes or rules. John Carter of Mars, however, set the tone for how the "stranger in a strange land" premise would be used in science fiction.

Fast forward to 1928. Armageddon 2419 A.D. by Phillip Frances Nowlan is published in the famous pulp science fiction magazine Amazing Stories. Readers thrill as Anthony Rogers, a World War I veteran, falls victim to radioactive gas and falls into suspended animation. Rogers wakes 492 years later in a world where the United States has been toppled by the Hans of Mongolia. The descendants of Americans now live in gangs spread throughout the wilds of North America. They're ready to take back their land - all they need is someone to lead them. Rogers turns out to be that someone, of course. His experience as a soldier in World War I combined with the advanced technology of the 25th century are just what is needed to defeat the enemy.

The story of Anthony Rogers might have been a footnote in science fiction history - a few stories published in the pulps - if not for John F. Dille, the president of the National Newspaper Service syndicate. Dille hired Mr. Nowlan to turn his pulp stories into a comic strip with one change: the name of the lead character needed to be punchier. Stronger.

And thus, Buck Rogers was born. The comic strip was a huge success.

To compete with Buck Rogers, the King Features syndicate hired artist Alex Raymond to create another science fiction epic. Raymond took inspiration from both John Carter and Buck Rogers to create polo player and Yale University graduate, Flash Gordon, in 1934. Readers thrilled week after week as Flash Gordon traveled to the planet Mongo and had any number of thrilling adventures as he sought to save both Earth and Mongo from the ruthless dictator, Ming the Merciless. Along the way Flash made friends, defeated monsters and attracted the attention of countless beautiful princesses and queens (but always stayed true to his Earth love interest, Dale Arden).

Where John Carter was a pulp invention and Buck Rogers was a pulp invention adapted for comics, Flash Gordon was invented specifically for the newspaper funny pages and in the long run, his popularity surpassed the others. Flash Gordon proved that a science fiction character created for comics could succeed.

Which brings us to Futura. Fiction House realized two fundamental truths when putting together their science fiction anthology comic Planet Comics:

1. Their readers liked John Carter/Buck Rogers/Flash Gordon style adventures.
2. Their readers like looking at pictures of scantily clad, attractive women.

And thus, Futura was born. Like Carter, Rogers, and Gordon, Futura is a stranger in a strange land - transported from Earth to a new world where she becomes both hero and general, conquering evil. There are important differences, however. Futura represents a change in the "stranger" formula. First, she's nothing special. While Carter and Rogers are war veterans and Gordon is a rugged polo player, Futura is a low level secretary. As Futura herself says she has "no money, no family... only a norm-plus rating intelligence quota, energo-efficiency, and mating potential". However, once removed from the repressive atmosphere of a world where every aspect of life is analyzed and categorized Futura flourishes as an action hero and rebel leader. In fact, that's another difference. Carter, Rogers, and Gordon all come from the present day (from the point of view of their publication date) but Futura lived on Earth in the 21st century. This gives her familiarity with advanced technology such as that used by her enemies, allowing the comic to skip tedious scenes in which Futura learns how to fly a rocket ship or use a jet pack.

Most importantly, Futura is a woman. It is true she's drawn to please the male eye but her gender is never truly a factor. The natives of her new world distrust her at first because she's an outsider, not a woman. More importantly, Futura makes allies as well as Carter, strategizes as well as Rogers, and does daring do as well as Gordon.

There's a line from John Carter to Buck Rogers to Flash Gordon to Futura in the science fiction "stranger in a strange land" family. Sadly, though, she remains one of the few leading women in a field crowded by leading men.

[Yoc]

That's a wonderful entry there J.  I quite enjoy the history lesson mixed with opinions.
One of your best yet! 

[JGray]

Thanks, Yoc! Probably nothing you didn't already know of course.

Commentary from Futura (from Planet Comics #43), page 3

Chester Martin

Every installment of Futura was credited to John Douglas. The catch is, of course, that he didn't exist. John Douglas was a house name attached to the Futura brand so that readers thought there was consistency from one comic to the next.

Sadly, there's no evidence to lead us to the writer of Futura's terse, technobabble filled prose. However, by comparing art styles and following the clues we can say with some certainty that the artist of this Futura installment is Chester Martin.

Unfortunately, there's very little I can tell you about Chester Martin. I can only find his name attributed to a handful of covers, mostly for Planet Comics or the book's sister, pulp publication Planet Stories. More likely than not, Mr. Martin was an in-house artist for Fiction House, the publisher of Planet Comics and Planet Stories in 1946 at the very least. His work on Futura seemed to be the pen and ink style pulp and adventure comic artists were so fond of. Lots of shading. Lots of cross-hatching.

Outside of work for Fiction House I can only find one other piece of art by Chester Martin: the cover of Science Fiction Digest #1 published in 1954 by the Specific Fiction Corp.

It is possible Chester Martin isn't the artist's real name but the pen name he used while working at Fiction House. It is also possible Chester Martin was only in the pulp and comic field for a short time. For whatever reason, though, there's precious little information available and that's a shame. He's a pretty spectacular artist.

[Yoc]

Hi J,
No, there were some dots you connected that I hadn't considered but made sense once you showed them.  I must admit I'm not a strip reader but might someday down the road.

[JGray]

Commentary on Future (from Planet Comics #43), page 4

Planet Comics

Debuting in January of 1940, Planet Comics was a comic book spin-off of Planet Stories, a pulp science fiction magazine. The focus of both Planet Comics and Planet Stories was space opera: powerful young men, beautiful and scantily clad young women, ray guns, space ships, and plenty of technobabble.

Planet Comics started off as a monthly book then, perhaps because of paper rationing during World War 2 dropped down to a bimonthly title. Towards the end of the 1940s, Planet Comics was reduced again, this time to a quarterly title. Unfortunately, things didn't improve from there. For three years, 1950, 1951, and 1952, Planet Comics was released annually. After 1952, the title returned to a quarterly release schedule but the last nail was already in the coffin. The final issue of Planet Comics was number 72, released in the fall of 1952.

It is notable how many female led features appeared in the pages of Planet Comics. In addition to Futura, female leads included Gale Allen and her Girl Squadron, Mysta of the Moon and Amazona the Mighty Woman. Female characters were also prominently featured in male lead features such as the Lost World, Flint Baker, and the Space Rangers. Cynically, the reason for so any female characters is that many of Planet Comics' readers were men and liked looking at beautiful women in tight and revealing clothing. Despite this, the female characters in Planet Comics spent as much time being capable adventurers as damsels in distress.

[Yoc]

Another nice write up there J.
Could I add some of it to the title description on the download site?

[JGray]

Yoc: By all means. Feel free to use anything I post here to help out on DCM.

Commentary on Futura (from Planet Comics #43), page 5

Good Girl Art

We've all heard it: there's too much sex. Too much sex on television, in advertisements and in comics. Pundits and parents alike bemoan this as if twenty years ago or fifty years ago or seventy years ago everything was chaste and moral.

That's far from the truth. Because the truth is sex sells and sex has always sold. From pretty much the beginning pulp magazines were famous for their lurid covers as they were for their stories. As comics started showing up on newsstands pulp publishers took notice. Those publishers began putting out comics as well and they took the lessons they learned from their pulp magazines and applied them to their new ventures.

Like many artistic movements, Good Girl Art wasn't recognized until well after the fact. In the 1970s a man named David T. Alexander, a veteran comic book dealer, began highlighting certain comics in his catalog by making special note of covers which depicted women in especially sexual ways with the term: good girl art. The term was embraced by the comic book community of the time and has survived to this day.

Good Girl Art is defined as art which depicts attractive women in provocative poses and skimpy attire. Often situations of peril and/or bondage was often involved. Most often, good girl art is associated with covers but as Futura has shown, the term can also be applied to interior art as well.

Good girl art was something of a code word: a way for collectors to talk about erotically charged art without using words like sex or erotica. Often these female characters were anything but good. In fact, they were quite often the villain of the piece: the gun moll, temptress, mata hari or dragon lady. Of course, the most famous example of good girl art from the golden age is Phantom Lady, especially as published by Fox Feature Syndicate and drawn by artist Matt Baker. The cover of Phantom Lady #17 was reproduced in Frederic Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent as a prime example of over-sexualization found in comics.

The irony, of course, is that most of the good girl art covers produced in the golden age of comics are relatively tame compared to modern comic covers. At the very least, most golden age cover artists understood the proportions and motion range of anatomy. I can't say that for a lot of modern artists.

[Yoc]

Thanks for the permission J.
I wasn't aware of the origins of the term 'good girl art' so thanks for that as well.

[larrytalbot]

I never knew before, if it was art showing:
good ("moral") girls (Good-Girl Art);
good (well drawn) art of girls, moral or otherwise (Good Girl-Art);
or art showing "Good" (snicker, snicker) girls ("Good"-Girl Art). 

From your article, it appears to be the latter.
Thanks for clearing that up.

[JVJ (RIP)]

Thanks, Yoc! Probably nothing you didn't already know of course.

Commentary from Futura (from Planet Comics #43), page 3

Chester Martin

Every installment of Futura was credited to John Douglas. The catch is, of course, that he didn't exist. John Douglas was a house name attached to the Futura brand so that readers thought there was consistency from one comic to the next.

Sadly, there's no evidence to lead us to the writer of Futura's terse, technobabble filled prose. However, by comparing art styles and following the clues we can say with some certainty that the artist of this Futura installment is Chester Martin.

Unfortunately, there's very little I can tell you about Chester Martin. I can only find his name attributed to a handful of covers, mostly for Planet Comics or the book's sister, pulp publication Planet Stories. More likely than not, Mr. Martin was an in-house artist for Fiction House, the publisher of Planet Comics and Planet Stories in 1946 at the very least. His work on Futura seemed to be the pen and ink style pulp and adventure comic artists were so fond of. Lots of shading. Lots of cross-hatching.

Outside of work for Fiction House I can only find one other piece of art by Chester Martin: the cover of Science Fiction Digest #1 published in 1954 by the Specific Fiction Corp.

It is possible Chester Martin isn't the artist's real name but the pen name he used while working at Fiction House. It is also possible Chester Martin was only in the pulp and comic field for a short time. For whatever reason, though, there's precious little information available and that's a shame. He's a pretty spectacular artist.

There were (apparently) THREE "Martin"s in comics in the late '40s/early '50s, and the original Futura artist is the Planet cover artist, I believe. But he's most likely not Chet. 

1. Yes, there was a cover artist for Planet circa 1946, first name, as far as I know, unknown, but he's the TOP contender for the Futura job and he's NOT the 'Chet Martin' who is credited at Iger in 1952. This Martin does issues 43 through 49. I know Bob Barrett and I'll check with him as to the source of the FIRST name for those credits. His cover style makes him the top contender for the Futura origins. 

2. Chester or "Chet" was active at Iger only in the early 1950s and 'Chet Martin' was the pen-name of CHESTER BLASKI. He wasn't an especially profound artist and certainly not capable, nor working around the time, of Futura.

3. In the early 1950s, Enrico Bagnoli used the pen-name on jobs he did for St. John. Perhaps editors couldn't remember or pronounce "Bagnoli". What's MOST confusing about Futura/Martin is that Bagnoli is the artist who eventually replaced the first artists (perhaps another "Martin" and then Walter Palais) and brought the strip to its greatest heights, artistically. So there an artist who would eventually sign "Martin" doing Futura from #53 on.

So not much is known about "Chet Martin" because, like "John Douglas", he didn't exist either. So much more to learn. I hope Bob can dig up the real first name of the "Martin" who did the pulp covers. My last exposure to that thread of research was that there was no first name attached to the signature anywhere. Perhaps more has been discovered. However, I HAVE seen some signed "Chet Martin" work from 1952, and working for the theory that an artist will retain some basic skills over his career, I can't imagine how he might have disintegrated to such a level of INability in five short years.

Thanks for listening. Peace, Jim (|:{>

[JGray]

Yoc: You're welcome.

Larry: You're also welcome!

JVJ: Let us know what you find out. The lack of credits on these books is maddening at times.

Commentary on Futura (from Planet Comics #43), page 6

Fiction House

In the 1920s pulps were hot sellers at the newsstands. Printed on cheap, wood pulp paper with ragged, untrimmed edges pulps sold for ten cents an issue. By contrast, glossy magazines with better production values sold for twenty-five cents an issue.

Fiction House was founded in 1927 by J.W. Glenister and John B. "Jack"� Kelly to take advantage of the strong pulp magazine market. Their first title was Action Stories but their line quickly expanded to include Detective Classics, Football Stories, Fight Stories, and Air Stories, the first aviation themed pulp magazine.

In 1938, Jerry Iger and Will Eisner approached Fiction House hoping to find a new client for their comic book packaging firm. Fiction House agreed to a test run and Iger and Eisner delivered the material needed to put out Jumbo Comics #1.

At first, Jumbo Comics didn't sell well and had Fiction House been any other publisher the title would have folded. However, with the might of their pulp empire to back them, Fiction House was determined to become a leader in the comic book field. Jumbo Comics was originally printed as an oversized book with a black and white interior but by issue nine they switched to full color illustrations in order to compete with other companies. With issue ten, Jumbo Comics became a standard sized comic books. More importantly, Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, became the obvious star character of the book. The original white jungle goddess, Sheena would become Fiction House's biggest star.

In the 1940s Fiction House marketed their big six comics aggressively: Jungle Comics, Wings Comics, Ranger Comics, Fight Comics, and Planet Comics (the home of Futura). In addition, Fiction House was putting out character led comics like Sheena, Firehair, and Wambi, one of the few jungle heroes who wasn't a displaced white person.

Over the years, Fiction House had a very diverse group of freelancers working for them including Matt Baker, the first prominent African-American artist in comics, Nick Cardy, Bob Powell and female artists such as Ruth Atkinson and Marcia Snyder.

Fiction House relied heavily on good girl art to sell their pulps and their comics. However, they also created a number of strong female protagonists such as Sheena, Firehair, Mysta of the Moon and Futura. The skimpy outfits and sexualized poses of the characters attracted the attention of Fredric Wertham and Fiction House was specifically targeted in his book, Seduction of the Innocent.

By the mid-1950s pulp sales were all but non-existent and the public outcry over "indecency"� in comic books was hurting the comic market as well. A company that relied on sex to sell books, such as Fiction House, could not survive. Their last title was Jungle Comics #163, sold in the summer of 1954.