Story Behind Fantastic Comics’ Most Iconic Lou Fine Cover, at Auction

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Fantastic Comics #3 could be Lou Fine’s most well-known cowl artwork, however the story behind it occurred in Fantastic Comics #4.

As each classic collector is aware of, an important cowl can have an amazing influence on the worth of a classic comedian e book. The cowl of Fantastic Comics #3 by artist Lou Fine and printed by Victor Fox makes that difficulty one of the crucial sought-after comedian books of the Golden Age.  It’s a fantastically rendered and detailed cowl by top-of-the-line artists of the Golden Age on a uncommon difficulty of a traditionally vital collection.  But the Fantastic Comics collection total has plenty of different nice covers by Lou Fine and others, and wonderful tales by the likes of Alex Blum, Don Rico, and Fletcher Hanks, amongst others.

More to the purpose, the story that impressed that unbelievable Fantastic Comics #3 robotic cowl by Lou Fine isn’t in that difficulty at all — it is in Fantastic Comics #4.  While there isn’t any copy of the fabled difficulty #3 on this explicit public sale, there’s an opportunity to get a duplicate of Fantastic Comics #4 (Fox, 1940) CGC VG/FN 5.0 Cream to off-white pages and different robust problems with the traditionally vital Fantastic Comics collection up for public sale within the 2023 September 28 The Fox Comics Showcase Auction #40239 at Heritage Auctions.

Whether the problem #4 Samson story or the problem #3 Lou Fine cowl that it matches ran out of order, or the mismatch occurred for another cause, we’d by no means know.  But it is attention-grabbing to notice that the inside story is a worthy supply of that well-known cowl. The villain of the story, a mad scientist named Kilgor, has satisfied a dictator to fund his manufacturing unit to create a military of seemingly indestructible large purple robots.  Kilgor then double-crosses the dictator and directs his military of 5,000 large robots to beat the world.  Samson is ready to cease the robotic military with the assistance of one other scientist named Professor Brun (and it is price noting right here that the company that Victor Fox entered the comedian e book area with was known as Bruns Publications).

The Fantastic Comics #4 “The Giant Robots of Kilgor” story has been tentatively credited to Will Eisner with paintings by Alex Blum.  But it might be extra doubtless that author and Alex Blum’s daughter Toni Blum wrote this story, and gave Lou Fine solutions on the subject material of the well-known difficulty #3 cowl.  This was additionally doubtless not the one well-known Lou Fine cowl wherein she performed a job. Fine’s legendary cowl on Hit Comics #5 is predicated on a scene from the inside story by Blum and Charles Nicholas Wojtkoski in that difficulty.  Blum can also be credited as the author of the debut Samson story in Fantastic Comics #1, and will thus be thought of the character’s co-creator.

An aspiring playwright who joined Eisner-Iger Studios alongside together with her father round 1938, Blum was detail-oriented.  According to her husband and Iger Studio artist William T. Bossert in later years, Blum labored with artists by offering a top level view after which advising them on web page breakdowns and factors of emphasis, noting “She’d write an outline, and she’d help [the artist] break it down page-by-page. Then she would get the pages back, and she would pencil in the actual dialogue on the page. Then the lettering man would letter the dialogue. … She’d say, ‘This is supposed to be on the fifth page and you have it on the second page. You’re giving away the whole story in the beginning.’ So she had to re-do the whole story as it went along.”

Will Eisner would additionally later observe that “Toni Blum was an in-house writer and wrote for George Tuska, Jack Kirby and Lou Fine. There were only two rooms and little in the way of secrecy. People in the studio could hear what was going on in the front office if they cared to listen.”

This all appears to indicate that Blum could have been giving Fine solutions on cowl imagery for her personal tales.  By means of distinction, Fine’s early Green Mask covers for Mystery Men Comics seem to have little to do with artist Walter Frame‘s inside tales.

The Fantastic Comics collection is stuffed with vital and well-crafted covers and materials together with the Samson function itself and the likes of Fletcher Hanks‘ Stardust.  There’s an opportunity to get a duplicate of Fantastic Comics #4 (Fox, 1940) CGC VG/FN 5.0 Cream to off-white pages and different robust problems with the traditionally vital Fantastic Comics collection up for public sale within the 2023 September 28 The Fox Comics Showcase Auction #40239 at Heritage Auctions.

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