Tuesday, March 18, 2025

THIS COMIC IS 'WEIRD'

Focused primarily on jungle, super-hero and crime comics, Victor Fox produced just one horror title during the Pre-Code era. WEIRD COMICS ran for 20 issues from April 1940 through January 1942. It wasn't even so much a horror title as it was an anthology of all sorts of "weird" strips that included characters such as Thor, The Sorceress of Zoom, Blast Bennett and The Voodoo Man (not really a horror strip).

The one story series that can be considered horror-themed is Dr. Mortal, a mad scientist who, each issue, dabbles in "things man was not meant to know".

The first issue of WEIRD COMICS (April 1940) with cover art by George Tuska introduces the character in the story "The Man Who Made Monsters", written and drawn by Bert Whitman.

Bert Whitman (July 27, 1980 -- December 10, 1990) was born in Brooklyn. He is best known as a newspaper cartoonist for the comic strips GREEN HORNET, SCORCHY SMITH, DEBBIE DEAN and others.

Besides Fox, Whitman worked for various other comics publishers in the early to mid 1940's, including Fawcett (where he drew NYOKA, THE JUNGLE GIRL stories), Holyoke and Marvel. He believed his greatest achievement in the comic book industry was running his own studio, Bert Whitman Associates. During the two-year period he was in business during the early 1940's, he bought the rights for THE GREEN HORNET radio show which he later sold to Harvey.

The recipient of many awards during his lifetime, Whitman's cartoons and oil paintings have been shown in the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as other art exhibitions.









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