Identifying mystery artists 0

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Good article. I remember 

11 hours ago, Cat-Man_America said:

My recollection is that the claim of bundling low performing titles with Cap came directly from one of Joe Simon's books (either his autobiography My Life In Comics or The Comic Book Makers), but I've read other articles and interviews where this topic was discussed with some authority.  How the bundling of Cap with was achieved is certainly open to debate.  My suspicion is that Cap was just bundled with the titles that were losing money to lower the percentage of shared profits.  For quick reference I pulled up the article below. S&K were apparently supposed to receive 25% of the profits from Cap.  The article describes a second conflict with MLJ over use of the Hangman (the first was over the shield design).  Simon learned about the accounting maneuver when pulled aside by Maurice Coyne, who also happened to be Goodman's accountant...

http://marvelsilverage.blogspot.com/2020/02/exposed-myths-of-marvels-silver-age.html

 

This won't answer all the questions still locked in the basement of time (in fact, it may raise a few more), but the schemes make perfect sense in the cutthroat world of 1940's comics. 

Good article. I remember parts of it but didn’t connect the “basket accounting” you mentioned as a cause. I do remember the accountant “outing” Martin. They also never mentioned if what the accountant said was entirely true or not since the story seemed they (Archie pubs) were trying to screw Martin afterwards and S&K decided not to stick around to find out. Things were always assumed about Goodman because he was so shady and cheap in business. To be fair getting 25% of the profits was a very big give by any publisher back then and they all tried to lowball their workers. DC might have paid well for weekly paychecks but what they did to Superman’s creators was just sad. Archie did not take great care of Bob Montana either. He continued working for them but never received any piece of Archie to set him up like he deserved for being part of such an iconic creation. Had he lived longer maybe he might have considered going after Archie like Dan DeCarlo would many years later.

One error in that article was USA comics did not feature Captain America in it before S&K left. Their last issue was #3 and Cap didn’t get featured until #6.

[Electricmastro]

Am uncertain if this art from Funny Book #6 is by Chad Grothkopf:

Edited September 7, 2020 by Electricmastro