Two more treasures found in my late sister-in-law Ellen Vartanoff’s collection — mid-’60s scripts by the extremely prolific comics writer Otto Binder. Wikipedia claims he wrote 4,400 stories under his own name — and 160 more under the pen-name Eando Binder. But how many survived?

One was published in Mighty Samson #6 (June 1966) …

… the other in Creepy #6 (December 1965).

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Have you ever wanted to own a page—or perhaps two—of rare original DC Comics art from the ’60s? Now’s your chance!

My wife has decided to part with the following pages which have been in her collection for more than 50 years.

First up—this beautiful Joe Kubert art from the Hawkman and Hawkgirl story “The Men Who Moved the World,” which appeared in Brave and Bold #44 (October-November 1962).

Place your bids here. (more…)

Judgment Day and Other Stories, reprinting 23 classic EC tales drawn by Joe Orlando, has just been published by Fantagraphics Books. The volume contains many science fiction classics, including “Judgment Day,” an anti-racism allegory that ended up being the last story in EC’s last comic book, plus many adaptations of Earl and Otto Binder’s Adam Link robot stories.

Which seems like a perfect reason to post yet another of the drawings I got when I was an annoying kid with a sketchpad who wandered conventions pestering artists. Here’s one Orlando did for me of Adam Link, years before he became my editor on such comics as Welcome Back, Kotter.

I’m not sure exactly when he drew this for me, but my best guess is that it was at the 1972 EC Fan Addict convention, where I also got sketches from Al Williamson, George Evans, and many others.

It was a much different world back then, one in which artists would happily (well … willingly, anyway) draw for fans for free. These days, all those annoying kids with sketchpads are paying for their art … which, I imagine, makes them a heck of a lot less annoying.