The Golden Age stalwart was born 113 years ago… By PETER BOSCH The late Syd Shores gained a reputation as a great inker during the 1960s and 1970s at Marvel, especially on the fantastic pencil work of Jack Kirby. However, so much of his own art, especially from the previous decades, has often gone unnoticed. In the 1940s and 1950s, he was drawing many of the mainstay heroes of Timely and Atlas, including Captain America, the Human Torch, and the Sub-Mariner. This being his birthday — he was born Sydney Schwartz in Lawrence, Massachusetts, on September 4, 1913 — it’s the perfect time to again pay tribute to that amazing period of his career. Here are 13 COVERS — each with added zest, thanks to the seductive sirens Shores would include. Enjoy! (Note: All covers pencilled and inked by Shores unless noted.) — — MORE — 13 COVERS AND SPLASH PAGES: A BLONDE PHANTOM Salute to SYD SHORES. Click here. — THE DARLING OF COMICS: A BLACK CAT Birthday Salute to LEE ELIAS. Click here. — 13th Dimension contributor-at-large PETER BOSCH’s first book, American TV Comic Books: 1940s-1980s – From the Small Screen to the Printed Page, was published by TwoMorrows. (You can buy it here.) A sequel, American Movie Comic Books: 1930s-1970s — From the Silver Screen to the Printed Page, is out now. (Buy it here.) Peter has written articles and conducted celebrity interviews for various magazines and newspapers. He lives in...
A Bronze Age BACK TO SCHOOL showdown! By CHRIS FRANKLIN In late summer of 1980, I went school shopping for the first time. I was soon to enter kindergarten and in among the ritual of buying pants, shirts, shoes, a backpack (I chose a Peanuts model), there was the all-important selection of the lunchbox, or lunch kits as the manufacturers often called them. For kids, the lunchbox was essentially a metal billboard advertising your favorite characters, TV shows, and movies, designed to keep your bologna sandwich safe until lunch time. That year I chose Aladdin Industries’ Super Friends model, which had been in production since 1976. It was a hard decision, because sitting next to it on the shelf was their Superman: The Movie lunchbox. As much as I loved that film (it’s still my favorite movie of all time), I couldn’t argue that the SF box had MORE of the DC characters I loved from comics and TV. Most importantly, Batman and Robin. Years and several lunchboxes later, I came across something that blew my mind on several levels. Circa 1984, I was riding my bike down an alley near my home. There along the paved alley street, sitting in the grass was another lunchbox — a Marvel Super Heroes box with a similar design to my beloved Super Friends version (which I still owned), also produced by Aladdin. I had never considered stealing anything in my life, but this abandoned metal box tempted me. I rode past it several times. Went home, and came back, riding by again, thinking how easy it would be to make it mine. I even revisited it a few days later, and IT WAS STILL SITTING THERE! Whoever owned this clearly didn’t deserve it, treating it like this! But all those comics I read had given me a gushy moral center, and I couldn’t do it. So, it evaded me for another four decades until I bought it at a toy show just a few years ago. Now owning the two, and displaying the similarly designed boxes side by side, I began to wonder, what would I have done if I’d had to choose between them on that fateful day in August 1980, or perhaps a few years earlier? Would I have gone with the DC model, or the Marvel? What would...
EXCLUSIVE: The all-ages line brings you some vintage — and some new!
Scott and Dan hit up the comics racks from 41 years ago…
