Lot a lot of my friends back then, growing up in the sixties in Chicago I was enamored of comic books.
I started collecting them when I was eight or nine years old, and I remember taking several bus rides to get out to the small hard core gathering of avid comic book collectors taking place in the conference room of a bank out west on Irving Park Road in Chicago to buy my first golden age comics. I felt like one of the youngest kids in attendance that day.
I soon came to know the names of the great comic book artists of the day that people were starting to take seriously and search out the issues with their covers or artwork - Frank Frazetta, Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby, and earlier artists like Al Williamson, Carl Barks, Alex Raymond and Milton Caniff.
Over the years, as comics gained in respectability, more and more obscure artists have been rediscovered and their work has been republished and reintroduced to new generations of fans or brought to the attention of older fans for a new appreciation.
I grew up loving Edgar Rice Burroughs and had collected and read most of his novels in their ACE edition paperbacks. But I had never heard of Jesse Marsh, nor seen the DELL comic book series he drew based on Burroughs' Tarzan characters, until they were lovingly reprinted a few years back by Dark Horse.
Marsh was a Disney animator who came to draw Tarzan after WW2 and had a decades long run doing various books for Dell until the mid-sixties. His drawings are simple, almost naive, but they really capture a young boys imagination, even a 53 year young boy like myself.
I'm glad the excavation of 20th Century pop culture continues, and that they are digging deep to find these gems and give them new life.
Enjoy!
william
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