Monday, June 13, 2011

Giant Red Ants

Even though this is a site dedicated to Walt Kelly, it still seems to make sense to show the Al Hubbard story art for The Adventures of Peter Wheat, since it's a continuation of Kelly's creation. Here we have issue #54, as always thanks to OtherEric of the Digital Comic Museum and his dedication to track down every possible issue of these rare comics to share with the world.

An introduction from OtherEric:

Here's a Connell/Hubbard issue of Adventures of Peter Wheat, #54 from 1955. While this team created fewer issues than Kelly, they actually worked on the book quite a bit longer than Kelly did—it just came out less frequently and on an irregular schedule that I still haven't quite figured out yet. The situation is not helped by the fact that the information line with the issue number and year is frequently blurry or unclear. I've hit several issues that were incorrectly labeled by the sellers and have at least one or two where I'm still only 90% sure I've correctly identified the issue even when it's in my hands.

This is a fairly typical issue by the team, and with one exception Thom and I will get to soon, it seems like they never did continued storylines. One thing I do like is that they only rarely use the Wizard and the Hornet Knights as the enemy—creating an interesting variety of new foes and challenges for Peter & crew to face. Kelly got away with using Dragonel and the Wizard as much as he did because he was constantly letting all the characters, heroes and villains alike, evolve and change. Connell & Hubbard seem to not have had that freedom, and take the series in a slightly different direction. This does allow them to occasionally pull out the Wizard to good effect when he does show up.

















1 comment:

  1. I hope I can remember the name of Al Hubbard. He was one whose competence and style made him recognizable to me at a fairly early age, and by high school, I regarded him as one of the "good artists," along with Barks. I mostly saw him in the "Mary Jane and Sniffles" comics at first, and later identified his brush on some Disney tie-ins--I'm thinking "Lady and the Tramp," or perhaps the spinoff series about Scamp. Anyway, a good read, and I'm glad I clicked on it.

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