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Boy Commandos #1, cover-dated Oct. 1973 |
In
a recent article I was wondering what artist was responsible for the bad guys and the big guns added to the foreground of the cover to 1973's
Boy Commandos #1. (A small image of the original artwork can be seen above.)
Afterwards I wrote to some comics experts who I felt might know the answer.
Nick Caputo wasn't sure but he posted a comment saying that he thought it might be
Joe Kubert but he wasn't sure.
Mark Evanier didn't know but he would say
Joe Orlando if he had to guess.
Mike Tiefenbacher couldn't be certain but he deduced that it might be
Nick Cardy. In fact, here's what
Mike wrote:
You're
right--I never thought about the cut-and-paste nature of this cover
either till you pointed it out, so it is a question that nobody I know
has asked me before. Since the cover of a first issue would hardly be
parceled out to a young staffer (the Woodchucks were quite young and
inexperienced at this point), and the machine guns are convincingly
rendered, I figure it was one of their A-list guys. Since it isn't
Kubert, who'd have been the obvious choice, my guess is that it's Nick
Cardy who was called upon to provide the lower third of the cover--since
he was tasked with providing almost all the covers on the rest of the
line at the time, and because that's who the inking on the hands
suggests. As a staff artist, he'd have been the one Nelson [Bridwell] would've
gone to first, I believe.
I appreciated the input from those gents but the artwork just didn't look like
Kubert or
Orlando or
Cardy to me so I went back to square one and put my thinking cap back on.
I asked myself what artists were adept at drawing technical details accurately from reference material. The machine guns on the above cover
are very convincingly drawn, after all! In no time at all the name
George Evans came to me. I felt far more comfortable with the above gunmen being by
Mr. Evans than those other three artists, and the below
Weird War Tales cover from the same exact month displays more evidence of detailed gun-drawing.
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Artwork by George Evans, cover-dated Oct. 1973 |
I was ready to come forward and say with 90% certainty that the
Boy Commandos addition was drawn by
George Evans. And then arrived another message from
Mike Tiefenbacher, this one containing the correct answer with
100% certainty:
I'm
not surprised to be wrong, given the small amount of material to work
with, but the obvious answer turns out to be the erroneous one.
According to John Wells, who went to the original art which had been on
Heritage's auction site, the perpetrator of the lower third of the BC #1
cover is none other than Luis Dominguez, the other regular DC cover
artist. Though his tenure as #1 cover artist only started when Cardy
left, I guess he had to start somewhere.
Case closed! It's so fulfilling to know the right answer to a challenging puzzle! And just to close out the day with some beautiful colors, here is another cover by the prolific Mr. Dominguez:
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A 1974 cover by Luis Dominguez |