Greg Clark Noir Art

LEGENDARY HEROES #19 JUNGLE JIM The comic strip "Jungle Jim" was created by Alex Raymond as the "topper" for his main feature "Flash Gordon", and both strips debuted on January 7, 1934.  Alex named the character for his brother, fellow cartoonist Jim Raymond who assisted Chic Young on "Blondie".  (Jim Raymond took over drawing the "Blondie" strip in 1950 when Young's eyesight diminished, though he never received a byline until Young's death).  Unlike the other jungle comics of the time that were set in Africa, Alex Raymond established the locale of his strip in Malaysia in the South Pacific.  Jungle Jim Bradley was a big game hunter who was assisted on his safaris by his native friend Kolu.  The comic was always a Sunday feature, never a daily, and the adventure stories centered around pirates, slave traders, and other dastardly villains.  During WWII Jungle Jim joined the cause and fought against the Japanese.  In 1944 creator ...

  LEGENDARY HEROES #18 FLASH GORDON Flash Gordon was created by King Features Syndicate to compete with the already established comic strip Buck Rogers.  The syndicate originally attempted to purchase the rights to the John Carter of Mars stories written by Edgar Rice Burroughs, but when that failed they approached Alex Raymond with the idea of creating a comic strip story set in space.  One source of inspiration for Raymond was the 1933 novel "When Worlds Collide" by Philip Wylie - the story of an approaching planet threatening Earth, an athletic hero, his girlfriend, and a scientist who travel to the new planet by rocket.  Alex Raymond adapted this storyline as the origin of Flash Gordon.  Flash, handsome polo player and Yale University graduate, is kidnapped along with his girlfriend Dale Arden by a half-crazed scientist named Dr. Hans Zarkov.  They blast off in a rocket to the planet Mongo that is on a collision course with Earth where they halt the col...

  LEGENDARY HEROES #17 THE SPIDER The Spider - Master of Men - was created by Harry Steeger at Popular Publications to directly compete with Street & Smith's pulp magazine The Shadow.  The first Spider pulp was released with the October 1933 issue with the story "The Spider Strikes" and would continue on a monthly basis until 1943 resulting in 118 Spider novels.  A 119th novel had been written but was not published until decades later.  The 118 stories were attributed to Grant Stockbridge, an in-house name used by Popular, with most of the novels written by Norvell Page.  Page (1904-1961) spent 12 years as a newspaperman covering criminals, gangsters, and viewing dead bodies in the morgue before turning to the pulps as a writer.  He wrote a back-up story that appeared in the first issue of The Spider, and by issue #3 he was the main writer of the series.   The Spider was millionaire playboy Richard Wentworth who had served in WWI as a major an...

  LEGENDARY HEROES #16 SMILIN' JACK Zack Mosley (1906-1993) was born in Hickory, Oklahoma and graduated in 1925 from Shawnee High School.  Soon after he enrolled in the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and the Chicago Art Institute.  From there he became an assistant to Dick Calkins on his comic strip "Buck Rogers".  Mosley had a fascination with airplanes and flying that went back to his childhood days in Oklahoma when, at age 7, he saw a crashed plane and the sight of it fired his imagination.  Zack began taking flying lessons in 1932 which inspired him to create a comic strip titled "On the Wing" about a trio of flying students.  It was a Sunday feature that began running on October 1, 1933, and the lead character was named Mack Martin.  But Chicago Tribune editor Joseph Medill Patterson never liked the title or character name and changes were made.  Mack Martin became Jack Martin, and the nickname Smilin' Jack was in reference to Mosley himself, w...

  LEGENDARY HEROES #15 JOE PALOOKA In the 1920s "palooka" was a widely used term to mean someone of low intelligence and/or an inept fighter.  And a chance meeting in 1921 inspired Ham Fisher to create Joe Palooka, the comic strip heavyweight boxing champ of the world.  Fisher (1900-1955) had dropped out of high school at age 16 to begin working a host of lowly occupations, eventually becoming a reporter for his hometown paper in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.  It was there outside of a poolroom that Ham Fisher met a boxer that sparked an idea of a comic strip.  Fisher conceived of a big, good-natured prize fighter who was a defender of the little guy, who championed good sportsmanship and fair play.  Fisher ran back to his newspaper office and drew a set of strips and then began making the rounds of the syndicates.  Nine years later, with numerous rejections to show for his efforts, Fisher was a salesman for the McNaught Syndicate and he sold his employe...