A BIRTHDAY SALUTE to the late artist — in 13 STRIPS…
By PETER BOSCH
Delving back two years ago into an article I wrote celebrating the 100th anniversary of comics artist Frank Giacoia’s birth (on July 6, 2024), I noticed I barely gave mention to the Sherlock Holmes newspaper strip he worked on for 2 1/2 years in the mid-’50s. Of course, it had to be a brief mention because I was covering a 40-year career.
However, I was reading a number of those strips again recently and his artwork was quite exceptional. (He also got assistance from his friends, Mike Sekowsky and Gil Kane.) The stories for the strip (which ran from March 1, 1954 to November 17, 1956) were quite often adaptations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s tales of the great detective and Giacoia captured the atmosphere admirably. (The stories’ adapter was Edith Meiser, who wrote many Sherlock Holmes radio show scripts of the 1930s and 1940s.)
Here are 13 STRIPS and PAGES…
—
October 19, 1954
October 25, 1954
November 28, 1954
January 2, 1955
February 13, 1955
May 1, 1955
May 29,1955
July 31, 1955
September 21, 1955
February 26, 1956
Five years after the strip ended, Giacoia drew two separate New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes issues in the Dell Four Color line, #1169 (Mar.-May 1961) and #1245 (Nov. 1961-Jan. 1962).
Dell’s Four Color #1169 (Mar.-May 1961), cover artist unknown, and #1245 (Nov. 1961-Jan. 1962), cover artist George Wilson.
Below are three superb pages from Dell Four Color #1169:
OK, now, put on your deerstalker hat and let us know which strips/pages from above you detect were pure Frank Giacoia, or assisted by Sekowsky or Kane… or is there a Professor Moriarty someone behind it all?
The game’s afoot!
—
MORE
— FRANK GIACOIA: A 13 COVERS Centennial Salute to One of Comics’ Greatest Inkers. Click here.
— Introducing… BATLOCK HOLMES: The Dark Sleuth. 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 Hollywood.
July 6, 2026
Never really saw Giacoia’s solo pencils, but there was something, and I can’t put my finger on it – but something he did for other artists as an inker. What he did for Ross Andru’s Spider-Man pencils was the icing on the cake. I’ve touted him for years and been interested in this mystery guy to me.
July 6, 2026
The line quality of that ink work is gorgeous!
July 6, 2026
Wow! I had no idea! That artwork is awesome and as a teen I really got into Sherlock Holmes via the books and the Basil Rathbone movies being shown on Saturdays.
July 6, 2026
These are great fun. I’d pay for a re-printing of the whole run in the original b/w too! And purely guessing here but I detect some Kane in the May 1st strip.
July 6, 2026
I have loved Giacoia’s beautiful Sherlock Holmes artwork since I first saw a sampling of these strips in Peter Haining’s “Sherlock Holmes Scrapbook”–more than 40 years ago. For the longest time they were inaccessible; but then in the 1990s Malibu Press published two volumes collecting some of the dailies, and Eternity Comics had a comic strip reprint series a bit later. A compendium of the Dell issues came out a decade ago, and is still be available.
But I’ve never gotten over my boyhood dream of a *complete* collection of the Giacoia/Meisner S.H. series–to join the great “Superman: The Dailies” volumes on my shelves, and hold an honored place in my extensive Sherlock Holmes collection.
As for the strips presented here: I detect a different artistic hand at work in the Jan. 2 and Feb. 13, 1955, strips–though I can’t say for certain whether it would be Sekowsky or Kane. (Between the two, I’d lean to Sekowsky.) I( recall that Carmine Infantino did some ghosting on the strip too, and the profiles depicted in the Feb. 26, 1956 strip feel like his work. Thanks so much, Peter, for this tribute to a wonderful artist and his work.
July 6, 2026
How do you pronounce Giacoia?
July 8, 2026
Funny that you would ask. Years ago, I wrote Roy Thomas, who had been a high school teacher at one point, asking the same thing – he wrote it to my phonetically – Gee-a-coya. The first G is how we say it in the alphabet.