So it
was published!
Some nice pages.
Another lesser known newspaper strip by a comic artist is by Mike Grell, who took over the Tarzan newspaper strip in 1981-1982. Some beautiful pages. I discovered them in the late 1980's when Blackthorne collected them in a four-issue
TARZAN series. The bulk of them by Russ Manning, but the fourth volume having a year's worth of strips done by Mike Grell, and a run after for roughly a year by Gil Kane.
Nice stuff, by both artists.
Some other great but lesser-known Marshall Rogers work is in two issues of Marvel's black and white
DEADLY HANDS OF KUNG FU magazine issues 32 and 33, a two-part "Daughters of the Demon" story of Misty Knight and Colleen Wing, with some very nice good-girl art.
Those were out about the same time Rogers was beginning his great runs on DETECTIVE COMICS and MISTER MIRACLE, as well as doing scattered stories in HOUSE OF MYSTERY, WEIRD WAR, SUPERMAN FAMILY, BATMAN FAMILY and similar anthology titles. It was great to see Rogers's approach, however brief, on a variety of different genres and characters in these shorter one-shot stories.
I especially liked Rogers' "Tales of the Great Disaster" stories in
WEIRD WAR 51 and 52 (originally, pre-Implosion, intended to run in KAMANDI) With post-Apocalyptic British bulldogs, looking very World War II / Winston Churchill-esque, fighting to keep invaders out of London, fighting their air war on giant flying insects.
Rogers was an artist who did a ton of beautifully detailed and sophisticated work, right out of the starting gate, not looking amateurish at all in his early work, as most do. Maybe because Rogers worked several years drawing as an architect before he came into comics. And he'd been trying to break into comics since 1972-1973, before he finally got professional work in comics. So there's probably a lot of work from that developmental 1973-1977 period that we haven't seen.
