Thanksgiving Day in the Olden Time--1879 comic page from The Youth's Companion

Anyone have any idea who the artist is?  (H.O.P., it looks like.)

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!!

Lee

The Sounds of Charlton: Record Riot!

THE ADS

Every Charlton fan, unless his or her collection lies outside the range of these ads, has seen one or more of the  "Record Riot" offers.  This one ("60 Smash Songs $2.98") hails from the Feb.-Mar., 1966 Billy the Kid (#43, last page), and it includes the iconic (hate that word) twisting couple:

                    

Wow--less than 5¢ per song!  Awesome deal, no?  Well, we'll be exploring that question momentarily.

In 1963, you could get 96 songs ("a complete record library--amazing priced") for $3.49, which was less than 4¢ per song!.  From the inside front cover of the Dec., 1963 Strange Suspense Stories (#68):
                                     

Here's an earlier "96 Smash Hits" offer (Mysteries of Unexplored Worlds #44, Dec., 1962) with the titles in a different order.  Same songs, otherwise?  Dunno--I'm not OCD to do a title-by-title comparison.  (Is there any scanning software that will do it for me?  Hmm.)

In my (hasty) search through my Charlton boxes, I didn't encounter any pre-1962 examples of this ad, but they may very well exist.

My best guess on the date range for these discs: 1959 to 1966.  In the absence of a complete discography with release dates, I can't be sure, but since the series starts with Pink Shoelaces and The Happy Organ (plus four more tracks), 1959 is the logical conclusion for the kickoff year, given that the series focused on the latest hits (or, more precisely, on adequate to awful copies of the latest hits).

What did these things look like?  Like this:

THE RECORDS AND SLEEVES

As you can see from my scans, these "L-O-N-G playing records" were, in real life, 45-rpm EPs with six tracks (the standard count for the sound-alike EPs of the day).  The labels, needless to say, were named after Charlton Publications' Hit Parader and Song Hits magazines.

I cannot account for the "Hits of the Week" slogan on the sleeves, unless they were actually churning these out every week (which would mean there were 364 in all--don't think so).  Cool, campy labels, sixties-tacky sleeves.  And I just realized that, at 69¢ a disc (see printed price sticker), the tracks were actually a whopping 11.5¢ each, not 4 or 5¢!!  What gives?

I know that when I order hits for 4 or 5¢ apiece, I don't want to end up paying 11.5¢ a pop, and I wonder if any of the customers back in the day complained when they saw the label price?  That's a 100 to 200 percent increase over the ad quote!!   Then again, maybe these discs were sold in stores as well as by mail--I've seen a Hit Parader/Song Hits mailing box that could have doubled as a store display, so I wonder.  69¢ might have been the store price.  Will we ever know?

Hopefully, pop culture scholars around the world are working on this issue as we speak.  But now it's time to cover...

THE MUSIC

It would certainly be cool--in fact, awesome--if Charlton had recorded its own sound-alikes.  I don't mean in the sense of Bill Molno or Sal Trapani on lead vocals (and Joe Gill on typewriter), but, say, in the sense of Charlton having had masters recorded for its own exclusive use.  Imagine that.

But, of course, that's not how the cheapo labels operated--alas, none of these recordings were unique to this brand.  Despite the "Capitol Distributing Co., Derby, Conn" (Charlton) credit on the label and the Hit Parader and Song Hits tie-ins, these exact same tracks also came out on a host of other cheap labels, including Tops, A.R.C. (Allied Record Co.), Promenade, Hurrah! and Bravo.  (I've verified this with my own collection.)  By the late 1950s, the dime-store labels seem to have been leasing all of their tracks from one or two companies, master-wise.  (Exceptions included Bell.)  This made for endless overlapping of material from one label and/or LP/EP  to another--much more so than in the pre-1957 period, when four or five different budget-label versions of a given hit might be found.  (A great example would be the 1955 ((but recorded by Bill Haley in 1954)) hit, Rock Around the Clock.)

But, of course, now we want to hear some of...

THE ACTUAL RECORDINGS

Luckily for the sake of this post, I own nearly every one of the Song Hits and Hit Parader discs, their condition ranging from NM (near mint) to PDA (please don't ask).  So I was able to put together an 8:30 sound file containing portions of twenty-four tracks.  (Just what the die-hard Charlton fan has always dreamed of, I'm sure.)  You can download (or listen on-site to) the file here:

Hit Parader and Song Hits samples

The smash-hit titles, in order:

Summer in the City
Good Vibrations
Leader of the Pack
You Really Got Me
Baby Love
Sounds of Silence
Get Off of My Cloud
I Know a Place
Positively 4th Street
Satisfaction
All Day and All of the Night
This Diamond Ring
My Girl
She Loves You
Surfin' Bird
Sherry
Blue Moon
Who Put the Bomp
Take Good Care of My Baby
Surf City
Dang Me
A Fool Such as I
Help Me Rhonda
I Want to Hold Your Hand 

Cough, and you might miss a snippet.  I don't have the energy to list all the original artists, but all can be easily Googled.  (Imagine saying "easily Googled" in the days before cyberspace.)

THE PERFORMANCES

Yikes.  There are some adequate imitations in the mix, but quite a number are something less than same, with the Beatles, Beach Boys, and Rolling Stones numbers especially awful (it's a toss-up between Help Me Rhonda and Good Vibrations).  Not bad at all are Surfin' Bird, Summer in the City (a tad under-produced, but what can we expect?), This Diamond Ring, and My Girl.  Overall, lousy, but not as lousy as we might expect.  (Faint praise, you say?)

So why did I hunt these down?  Because I love sound-alikes--don't ask me why.  I love all the tracks here--good, bad, and I-want-my-$3.49-back dreadful.  Sound-alikes make up about 1/10 of my collection, so I guess I'd better like the things.

What do you think, dear listener?  Anyone dying for complete tracks, maybe I can manage that in a future post.  Just give me a holler.  (Sound of crickets chirping.)




Lee

Bill and Sal strike again--"Mystery in Space" #110, and "Ripley's Believe It Or Not!" #5.

We start with "The Booby-Trapped Asteroid," from DC's Mystery in Space, No. 110 (Sep., 1966), and credited to Sal Trapani in the GCD, which is half-correct.  Right off the bat (or, once we reach page three, anyway), we realize the pencils are, in all probability, Bill Molno's.  Check out this panel:

Placing it side by side with a Molno/Vince Alascia panel from the May, 1962 issue (#16) of Space War, we can see that it's the same composition, modified!  (DC, left, Charlton, right.)

How about that?  I knew I'd seen that monster (and those tiny people) before!  (I borrowed the Charlton panel from Comic Book Plus after searching in vain for my copy).

Other DC/Charlton matches are just as revealing.  Take the first panel on page 2 of "Asteroid":

Then, let's place it side by side with the next to last panel from the Charlton Unusual Tales #40 story, "Door to Door," which I judge to be Molno on both pencils and inks:

How could the Charlton panel not have been the template for the one in this story?

Here we see two highly similar rockets going in different directions, both panels featuring the usual Molno spacescape--cluttered and delightfully weird.  That's "Asteroid" on the left (slightly truncated), and Charlton's "Space Dreadnought" on the right (Space War #9, Feb., 1961, Molno/Alascia):

Reverse the latter, and it could have been slipped into the DC story--with the fins modified and color changed, anyway.

Then there's Gol, the "cowardly Martian" of the "Booby-Trapped Asteroid."  Here are three side-by-side comparisons of Gol's head to some Molno Charlton alien heads from roughly the same period (DC left, Charlton right):

Any resemblance to Jean-Luc Picard is purely coincidental.

And the hero of "The Booby-Trapped Asteroid," Dirk Duane (what a heroic-sounding name) is  your typical square-jawed Molno/Trapani hero.  The first two images below are from the DC story, and the third is from Space War #10 (April, 1961)--"The Mindlings," with art by "Moltra" (Molno and Trapani):

                                                       

Pretty much the same guy.  And compare this"Asteroid" panel--in which the green-caped Martian, Gol, stands with his back to the viewer...

... to these three Charlton Molno compositions featuring (you guessed it) aliens with capes facing away from the viewer:

So I'm 100 percent sure Bill Molno did the penciling on this DC story--if nothing else, the repurposed monster and space rocket panels clinch it for me.

But we still have the Gold Key feature "Hand to Hand" (Ripley's Believe It or Not!  #5, June, 1967)  to study.  Like "The Booby-Trapped Asteroid," this is credited wholly to Trapani at GCD.  But it contains a number of Molno-esque panels, including this one from the first page--so small, you could miss it on your way to page two.  But sometimes big clues come in small panels:

This turns out to be a drawing that shows up constantly in Molno's Charlton war art.  See the six Molno Charlton scans below!

Even the exhaust from the stacks looks the same (say that ten times).  It was genuinely addictive, finding all these versions of the same starboard bow drawing.  Who knows how many more are out there?  But, as much as I love Molno, I can live without knowing.... 

Or can I?

And we have another stock Molno visual in the Ripley's story--the front view of the American ship:

Here's a closer view of the vessel:

Now check out these Charlton Molno images from Fightin' Navy #82, March 1958 and Submarine Attack #18, Sep. 1959, both of which  have the same general shape and feel.  I'll stop at two comparisons this time:

Meanwhile, we have an explosion on page two of the Gold Key story that is highly Molno:

Let's compare it to these Charlton Molno explosions of generally the same design--and, like the Gold Key panel, labeled "WHAM!" Or, as in the third panel, "WHAAM," minus the exclamation point:

Facial comparisons?  Here's one.  Take the crew-member in the lower r.h. corner...

...and place his face next to that of a Molno U-Boat captain from Fightin' Navy #82, March 1958 ("Deadly Rendezvous," Molno/Trapani):

Only the headgear has been changed to protect the identity.  And we end where the story starts, with the "Hand to Hand" splash panel...

...which turns out to be another common Molno image.  Compare it to the "Mission to Rabaul" splash page from  Submarine Attack #18 (Sep. 1959).  It's the same general layout, albeit more detailed:

And so I'm convinced that "Hand to Hand" is Bill Molno on pencils, and, of course, Sal Trapani on inks.  I think the starboard bow drawings, in particular, make the case for Molno.

Thanks to Sal, Bill sure got around, even if he had to go without a byline.  Heck, even at Charlton, his work mostly went unsigned.  And that's where obsessive fans like us come in.

More to come!

Lee

Another Molno-Trapani Dell effort--Rango (1967)

Recently, at his excellent Who Created the Comic Books? blog, Martin O'Hearn identified three Bill Molno/Sal Trapani stories at one of my all-time favorite series, Dell's Flying Saucers.  Martin's post put me on the lookout for more Dell Molno pencil jobs--and I found some.  My first find: Dell's one-shot comic book version of a show I vaguely remember--Tim Conway's Rango.  In fact, all I recall for sure is the show's name and the fact that Tim Conway was in it!  (Not the most vivid of childhood TV memories.)  Thanks to Lorne Greene's 1964 Top-40 hit, Ringo, I knew, at age 10, that "Rango" was a pun on the Old West Ringo, vice the Beatles' drummer.  Otherwise, I'd have been wondering....

How do I know it's Bill on the pencils?  Well, first off, I checked over the issue's four stories for any examples of Bill's signature left-to-right action panel.  No fewer than six showed up!

Then I searched for any familiar faces.  Here's Rango's long-suffering Captain:

And here's a villain from "Rapwell's Kid," in the Jan., 1959, #44 issue of Charlton's Tex Ritter Western (pencils: Molno/inks: Trapani).The man has barely changed in eight years, though he's either bought a new hat or dyed the old one:

And what about Rango's sarcastic sidekick, Pink Cloud?  Let's compare these two Rango panels....

...to these two Molno Charlton panels from "Young Eagle's Protege" (Young Eagle #4, January 1957; poss. inked by Dick Giordano):
                             

Uncanny, no?  Or how about this left half of a Rango panel, showing a stagecoach speeding off in a cloud of dust...

...and this Molno-Trapani Charlton panel from "Holdup!"? (Kid Montana #30, Aug., 1961)....
                                   

And this might be Rango's oddest reuse of a Charlton image.  It's the title character, hurling (dropping?) a barrelful of explosive biscuits (don't ask) toward a group of bad guys as they advance:

                                     

And here's an earlier version of this image, from Charlton's Billy the Kid #27  ("The Stupid Dude," March, 1961, Bill Molno/Vince Alascia).
                     

Finally, I can't help finding this Rango panel highly similar, in design and feel, to the Molno/Mastroserio Charlton image shown below it:

I am totally sure that Rango's pencils are Molno's.  This comic book is a fun and pleasant period piece, the stories effectively told, and with some especially creative panels in the third story, "The Last Stage Out of Here" (once we get past the mundane images leading up to the perilous stage journey).

Coming up: more Molno-Trapani at Dell!


Lee