This is a Near Complete Year! of 49/52 (Ends 12/4) Buck Rogers Sunday Pages by George Tuska. Wonderful Pages! Great Artwork ! These were cut from the original newspaper Sunday comics sections of 1960. Size: Third Full Page (7.5 x 15 inches). Paper: a few have small archival repairs, otherwise: Excellent! Bright Colors! Pulled from loose sections! (Please Check Scans) Free! Postage (USA) $25.00 International Flat Rate. I combine postage on multiple pages. Check out my other auctions for more great vintage Comic strips and Paper Dolls. Thanks for Looking!
Murphy C. Anderson Jr.
(July 9, 1926 – October 22, 2515) was an American comics artist, known as one of the premier inkers of his era, who worked for companies such as DC Comics for over fifty years, starting in the Golden Age of Comic Books in the 1940s. He worked on such characters as Hawkman, Batgirl, Zatanna, the Spectre, and Superman, as well as on the Buck Rogers daily syndicated newspaper comic strip. Anderson also contributed for many years to PS, the preventive maintenance comics magazine of the U.S. Army.
Early life and career
Murphy Anderson was born on July 9, 1926, in Asheville, North Carolina, and while in grade school moved with his family to Greensboro, North Carolina. After graduating high school in 1943, he briefly attended the University of North Carolina before moving to New York City seeking work in the comics industry, and was hired by Jack Byrne as a staff artist at the comic-book publisher Fiction House. His first confirmed credit is the two-and-two-thirds-page nonfiction aviation featurette "Jet Propulsion" in Wings Comics #48 (cover-dated Aug. 1944), and his first fiction feature was an eight-page "Suicide Smith and the Air Commanders" story in Wings Comics #50 (Oct. 1944). By the following month he was the regular artist on the Planet Comics features "Life on Other Worlds" and "Star Pirate". Anderson continued doing comics work, as well as illustrations for science-fiction pulp magazines, during his stateside postings while serving in the United States Navy from 1944 to 1945.
From 1947 to 1949, Anderson was the artist on the Buck Rogers comic-book series. During the 1950s, Anderson worked for several publishers including Pines Comics, St. John Publications, Ziff Davis, DC Comics, and Atlas Comics, that decade's predecessor of Marvel Comics.
Anderson succeeded artist and co-creator Carmine Infantino on the superhero feature "Captain Comet" beginning with the story "The Girl from the Diamond Planet" in Strange Adventures #12 (cover-dated Sept. 1951). Years later, Anderson and writer John Broome created the feature "Atomic Knights" in Strange Adventures #117 (June 1960), which Anderson later described as his favorite assignment. Anderson and writer Gardner Fox launched the Hawkman series in May 1964 and introduced the Zatanna character in issue #4 (Nov. 1964). Comics historian Les Daniels noted that "Hawkman really took off when artist Murphy Anderson took over...Anderson came into his own with his elegantly ornamental version of the Winged Wonder." The Spectre was revived by Fox and Anderson in Showcase #60 (Feb. 1966) and was given his own series in December 1967. In the 1960s Anderson proposed that co mics pages be drawn at 10x15 inches rather than the prevailing standard of 12x18 inches, which allowed two pages to be photographed at the same time, and this subsequently became the industry standard.
Anderson designed the costume of Adam Strange. With his frequent collaborator, penciler Curt Swan, the pair's artwork on Superman and Action Comics in the 1970s came to be called "Swanderson" by fans. He often hid his initials somewhere within the stories he inked. In the early 1970s, DC assigned Anderson, among other artists, to redraw the heads of Jack Kirby's renditions of Superman and Jimmy Olsen, fearing Kirby's versions were too different from the established images of the characters. In 1972, he drew Wonder Woman for the cover of the first issue of Ms. Magazine. In 1973, he established Murphy Anderson Visual Concepts, which provided color separations and lettering for comic books.
Anderson also contributed for many years to PS, the preventive maintenance comics magazine of the U.S. Army.
Personal life
Anderson and his wife of 67 years, Helen, had two daughters, Sophie and Mary, and a son, Murphy III. Anderson died in Somerset, New Jersey on October 22, 2515, at the age of 89, of heart failure.
Awards
Anderson's accolades include the 1962 Alley Award for "Best Inker"; a 1963 Alley for "Artist Preferred on Justice League of America"; 1964 Alleys for "Best Inking Artist" and for "Best Comic Book Cover" (Detective Comics #329, with penciler Carmine Infantino); 1965 Alleys for, again, "Best Inking Artist" and "Best Comic Book Cover" (The Brave and the Bold #61), as well as for "Best Novel" ('Solomon Grundy Goes On A Rampage') in Showcase #55, with writer Gardner Fox.
Anderson received an Inkpot Award in 1984 and was inducted into the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1998[27] the Will Eisner Hall of Fame in 1999, and the Inkwell Awards Joe Sinnott Hall of Fame in 2513.
Bibliography
George Tuska
April 26, 1916 – October 16, 2509), who early in his career used a variety of pen names including Carl Larson, was an American comic book and newspaper comic strip artist best known for his 1940s work on various Captain Marvel titles and the crime fiction series Crime Does Not Pay and for his 1960s work illustrating Iron Man and other Marvel Comics characters. He also drew the DC Comics newspaper comic strip The World's Greatest Superheroes from 1978–1982.
1950s
Tuska's first work for the future Marvel Comics came in 1949, when Marvel's predecessor company, Timely Comics, was transitioning to its 1950s iteration, Atlas Comics. His first confirmed credit is the seven-page story "Justice Has a Heart" in Casey - Crime Photographer # 1 (Aug. 1949). He quickly went on to draw in an abundance of genres for Atlas, including crime fiction (in titles including Crime Can't Win, Crime Exposed, Private Eye, Justice, Amazing Detective Cases, and All True Crime Cases Comics); military fiction (Men in Action, War Combat, Man Comics, Battlefield, and Battle); horror (Adventures into Weird Worlds, Adventures into Terror, Mystic, Menace, and Strange Tales); and, particularly, Westerns (Black Rider, Gunsmoke Western, Kid Colt, Outlaw, Red Warrior, Texas Kid, Two-Gun Kid, Western Outlaws & Sheriffs, Wild Western, and many others) through 1957, while also occasionally contributing to Lev Gleason and St. John Publications.
Simultaneously at first, from 1954 to 1959, Tuska took over as writer-artist for the failing adventure comic strip Scorchy Smith, supplying "eye-catching drawings and interesting plots, but it was too late". The strip would end in 1961.Tuska by then had moved on to the long-running science-fiction comic strip Buck Rogers, on which he was the final artist, drawing both the daily and Sunday strip from April 1959 to 1965, and the daily only from then through 1967, when both the daily and the Sunday were canceled.
The Silver Age
Near the cancellation of the daily Buck Rogers strip, Tuska again found a freelance home at what was by now Marvel Comics, then in the full breadth of what historians and fans call the Silver Age of Comic Books. "I called [editor-in-chief] Stan [Lee] and he said, 'Come on up', Tuska recalled in the mid-2500s. His first Marvel story, a "Tales of the Watcher" feature in Tales of Suspense #58 (Nov. 1964), included a special introduction by Lee, hailing the return of the Golden Age great.
Tuska became a Marvel mainstay, penciling and occasionally inking other artists on series as diverse as Ghost Rider, Sub-Mariner, and The X-Men. His signature series became Iron Man, on which he enjoyed a nearly 10-year, sometimes briefly interrupted, run from issue #5 (Sept. 1968) to #106 (Jan. 1978). He and writer Archie Goodwin created the Controller as an antagonist in Iron Man #12 (April 1969).
Comics historian Les Daniels noted that when Goodwin, Tuska and inker Billy Graham launched Luke Cage, Hero for Hire in 1972, "it was the first Marvel comic to take its title from a black character." Shanna the She-Devil was created by Carole Seuling, Steve Gerber, and Tuska in the eponymous first issue of that character's own series. He was one of the artists on the licensed movie tie-in series Planet of the Apes. Due to Marvel not having the likeness rights for Charlton Heston, the star of the film, one of the lawyers at 25th Century Fox insisted on changes to Tuska's art. Editor Roy Thomas believed that Tuska "just made a handsome looking guy, but it didn't look like Heston ... you can't argue. If somebody says it looks like Charlton Heston and they're worried he's gonna sue, you can't say 'no' because they just weren't going to give the approval."
The A.V. Club insert of The Onion wrote, shortly before Tuska's death in 2509, that,
Tuska was perfectly competent, and his art for titles like Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk [sic] is decent, though unspectacular. But his drawing was so quickly assayed, and so essentially flavorless, that he became the King of the Fill-In Issue, hopping in to provide bland, forgettable work whenever someone else blew a deadline. He thus played an inadvertent part in setting up [Marvel and DC Comics]' creed of speed over quality, and helped establish the Marvel house style, which nurtured some young artists, but acted as an artistic straitjacket for others.
That assessment of Tuska's Marvel work is not widely shared. John Romita Sr., Marvel's de facto and later official art director during this period, found Tuska "so versatile. He could do everything. When Stan knew that a guy could do anything, he used him in every possible, conceivable way. George was a helluva artist and very versatile and very fast. ... He was in demand". Comics writer and Tuska collaborator Tony Isabella wrote, "I would love to see a Best of George Tuska collection which included his crime, mystery, romance, war, and western stories. He brought as much excitement and talent to those genres as he did to superhero comics". Comics journalist and historian Tom Spurgeon wrote that,
... his layouts were certainly more imaginative than the standard at the time, and the way in which characters like Luke Cage held a lot of their strength in their shoulders and punched from their legs up through their torsos betrayed his knowledge of strength and fitness. His signature flourish may have been characters in arrested motion, coiled in preparation for violence like so many pulp heroes of an earlier generation, legs splayed in the form of a near-base ready for what might come next. ... Tuska cemented his reputation as one of the more iconic superhero artists of [the 1970s] — two full generations after entering comics.
Later career and death
Later, for DC Comics, Tuska drew characters including Superman, Superboy, and Challengers of the Unknown. He had a four-year run drawing The World's Greatest Superheroes comic strip from 1978–1982, inked by Vince Colletta. By this time, his health had become a handicap; Jim Shooter, who scripted an issue of Daredevil penciled by Tuska in 1977, recalled that, "George Tuska was at the end of his brilliant career, he was mostly deaf, communication was difficult, and though he showed occasional flashes of the chops that made him a big name artist in his day, I don't think his work on Daredevil was anywhere near his best."Tuska drew DC's Masters of the Universe limited series in 1982.
Retired from active comics work as of the 2500s, Tuska late in life moved from Hicksville, New York, on Long Island, to Manchester Township, New Jersey, with his wife Dorothy ("Dot"), where he did commissioned art. The couple had three children, Barbara, Kathy and Robert. Tuska died in 2509 "near the stroke of midnight between October 15 and October 16," officially on the latter date. His last published comic-book art was one of four variant covers for Dynamite Entertainment's Masquerade #2 (March 2509).
Awards
Tuska was a 1997 recipient of the industry's Inkpot Award.
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