Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Zudo the Jungle Boy in "The Pygmies' Shining Stone" (Standard;1944)










"The Pygmies' Shining Stone" starring Zudo the Jungle Boy was issued by William H. Wise & Company [as surrogate for Better/Standard/Nedor] in 1944. This tale was drawn by Ken Battefield and was originally published in Mystery Comics #4 (the final issue of the series).

Ken Battefield worked mainly for Wow Comics in the 1940s. There, he illustrated stories such as 'Destroy the Voskay Dam', 'The Rescue of Major Cambon', 'To Save the Suez Canal' and 'The Nazi Big Bertha', all featuring the character 'Rick O'Shay'. He also worked as a penciler on 'The Scarab' (Exciting Comics) and 'The Devil's Dagger' (Master Comics). For the Classics Illustrated series, he redrew the comic adaptation of Alexandre Dumas' 'The Man in the Iron Mask' for the reprint.

The Catacombs is grateful to Don "Zu-Gogo" Falkos for providing the scans for this story. Note: The copyright for this issue, its contents and artwork belong to the original publisher and/or the creators and is reproduced here solely for entertainment purposes.

Enjoy!

3 comments:

joe ackerman said...

Chuck, mate, you got an award. you deserve it, fella. go here. . .

http://grantbridgestreet.blogspot.com/2010/04/you-know-much-as-i-try-to-make-out-that.html

Chuck Wells said...

Joe, "Kreative Blogger" Awards seem to be the blogging equivalent of chain letters, perpetually popping up with no end in sight.

I appreciate the compliment and second your other choices for sharing this recognition, but I despise chain letters and am opting out of this one.

Robert R. Barrett said...

I'm afraid that I discovered your blog and many of your readers will probably not read any of my comments. Ken Battefield is an interesting "primitive" artist. He teamed with Everett Raymond Kinstler in the early 1940s, he doing the pencils and Kinstler inking. Of even more interest is the fact that Frank Frazetta did some inking over Battefield's pencils on some panels during the mid-1940s for Nedor/Better/Standard. Of course this was before they determined that he was capable of doing his own work. In the mid-1960s I discovered what I thought were Frazetta inkings on these stories and was able to confirm this with Frank, who had forgotten all about this work.