Tuesday, July 09, 2013

Gil Kane Cover of the Month: Mystery in Space #50

I am a big fan of purple suits on Gil Kane characters and I guess that it only makes sense that those are packed in purple luggage. This is a pretty typical, crazy cover to DC's flagship science fiction anthology series with a train racing away from Earth. I wonder just how many DC covers from the 50s featured the Earth? This is a wonderfully designed cover with a terrific sense of perspective using the train cars. I love how Kane does French cuffs on the conductor. This may not be an iconic Kane cover, but it has all of the elements that made his covers so compelling.

1 comment:

Four-Color Kid said...

The whole Julius Schwartz era of DC sci-fi anthologies is just pure awesome! I think I read somewhere that Schwartz would ask his main cover artists of the day (Gil Kane, Carmine Infantino, Murphy Anderson, etc.), to come up with crazy concepts covers first. Then, his regular stable of reliable writers (mainly Gardner Fox, John Broome, Otto Binder, Edmund Hamilton) were asked to come up with a story that could ''explain'' the situation on the cover.

I wish DC would reprint more stuff from those cool anthologies.

So far, they have published a volume 1 of SHOWCASE PRESENTS STRANGE ADVENTURES and I think volume 2 is coming out this fall (I hope we don't have to wait another 5 years for vol. 3!). By the way, does someone know why the Showcase S.A. volume 1 started reprinting with issue # 54 instead of #1 ?!?

There was also a single Showcase volume for TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED (early issues were more sci-fi and/or fantastic oriented than the more horror-oriented tales of the later issues).

But still no news on a Showcase MYSTERY IN SPACE volume or a MY GREATEST ADVENTURE volume with lots of art from masters Kirby and Meskin, and even some Toth!