Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Tor in “Isle of Fire” (St. John;1954)












Industry legend Joe Kubert is best known for his classic work on DC Comics war series like Sgt. Rock and for reintroducing silver age fans to Hawkman, but he started out in the golden age on strips like the Seven Soldiers of Victory in Leading Comics.

In 1953, Kubert as managing editor for St. John, along with writer Norman Maurer, created the enduring character Tor, a prehistoric-human who debuted in the comic 1,000,000 Years Ago #1 (Sept. 1953). Tor went on to star in 3-D Comics #2 (Oct.-Nov. 1953), followed by a traditional monthly comic series, continued exclusively by Joe Kubert, that premiered with this exciting tale called "Isle of Fire" from Tor #3 (May 1954). The characters adventures have been reprinted in books from Eclipse Comics, Marvel Comics' Epic imprint, and DC Comics through the 1990s. Kubert had tried unsuccessfully to sell Tor as a newspaper comic strip in the 1950's.

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:

Unca Jeffy said...

Always great to see Kubert's work!

A sidenote: Norman Maurer was Moe (The Three Stooges) Howard's son in law. He also wrote and drew the "Stooge" comic books in the 50's and 60's (and probably the 70's, too).

Michael Dooney said...

thanks for posting. I've read some of the newer Tor, but never this original stuff. I'd love to see some more some time ;)

Chris Riesbeck said...

Great post. This reminded me a lot more of Ditko than I remembered from Kubert's much later DC stuff.