Mike Ploog

It's Mike Ploog's birthday today, which leads me to making a bit of a confession. Back in The Bronze Age, I was a huge Ploog fan ( still am, obviously ), devouring Ghost Rider, Monster Of Frankenstein and particularly Werewolf By Night. So much so that, well, remember when Warren first started reprinting The Spirit? That was the first time a lot of fans had ever seen any Will Eisner, me included. And what was my first thought? How great this legendary strip was? How masterful Will's short story skills were? Nope, my first thought was: This guy is blatantly ripping off Mike Ploog!
I know, I know. Don't tell anyone, ok?

Not sure if everybody knows the Carmine Infantino story, or if I've mentioned it before, but what the hell, I'll tell it again, 'cos it's so great. In fact, thanks to Comic Book Artist, here's the whole sorry tale from Mike's own lips:
" ( When I started ) I knew nothing about comics. I remember sitting in a cafe called Friar Tuck's, across from DC Comics, with a bunch of artists. Sitting next to me was a total stranger. He had been introduced to me as a bigwig at DC Comics. His name was Carmine Infantino. Everybody was chatting and drawing on the table cloth. Suddenly this executive next to me picks up a ball point pen and begins to draw on the table cloth. I was impressed; Imagine an executive that can draw! I attempted to pay him a compliment, and said, " I'll be a son of a gun! You can draw too! " He glared at me, and you could've fried eggs on his cheeks. I don't think he said a word, just glared at me as if to say, " What do you mean, I can draw?? " I looked around the table at a load of blank, wide eyed faces. And with a further display of ignorance, I added. " Yeah, now if worst comes to worst, you could do that for a living. "
My memory is a bit vague about what happened next but I never worked for DC Comics. "

Here's The Ploogster doing his usual incredible job on his all too short run on Kull.

The Savage Sword Of Conan

The british version of The Savage Sword of Conan was one of the few things from Marvel UK I regularly bought. ( Other than Hulk Comic, natch! ) When Marvel first started it's british reprint line with The Mighty World Of Marvel and Spider-Man Comics Weekly, we were pathetically grateful. Distribution in the late '60's /early '70's was so spotty, literally all there was were the occasional Superman or Batman comics.


But by the mid '70's, Marvel had sorted all that out, and you could get just about anything they published, and nearly every month! ( I still remember the double-sized Claremont/Byrne X-Men where Phoenix died, which no shop in our town bothered to stock. We'd only been waiting a year to read that denouement! ) Sure, we still bought the british Marvel, sometimes, but they weren't the real thing. Firstly, they were in black & white, and worse, to fit three serials in each issue, they split every story in half! Which usually meant you'd get some clumsily scrawled splash page inserted in next week's issue. ( Apparently, people like Jim Starlin & Marshall Rogers did some of them. Musta missed those ones. )
By this point Dez Skinn was in charge at Marvel UK, and trying to at least vaguely improve things. With that particular back-handed sense only comic fans have, we, of course, hated everything he did. And then still bought it.


The UK version of Savage Sword came out in '77. and we hated it. And then bought it. On the plus side, it was monthly, with more pages on slightly better paper, so we could at least pretend it was a real Marvel comic. And of course, it was Conan. The Conan from the US Savage Sword, with all those fantastic Buscema / Alcala tales, nudity & gore still intact. In our town, you might get a copy of Marvel Preview once in a while, but that was about it for the US Marvel black & white's. On the minus, the stories were still cut in half, usually at a point where there was no kind of cliffhanger at all. Each issue featured half a Conan story, half a Red Sonja ( taken from her colour book & scanned in b/w ), and either a Solomon Kane or a Kull.
And then there was the covers:


I mean, it's actually quite a good design, but, knowing how antsy Neal Adams is about his work being cut up and spoilt, I can't see him giving it the seal of approval. And, at the time, it annoyed the hell out of me, especially when you ( occasionally ) saw how good the american version looked. Still, in England, if you wanted to read Conan, this was pretty much the only way you were gonna do it. And you can't knock the material. SSOC always had great frontispieces and portfolio's too. Here's a few examples: