Covered 365: Day 214

Famous Funnies #214, Eastern Color, November 1954. Artist: Frank Frazetta.

Day 214 had some great choices.

Blowing the wad early, I’ve given myself one more Frazetta and Famous Funnies #214 has the strongest cover of the three remaining Frazetta issues. I can spend a good length of time admiring the spaceship’s colours, hues and tones, then I have to move on to the rest of the cover.

If it wasn’t for Frazetta I would have gone with Wrightson’s classic cover to House of Secrets #214.

I’m a sucker for the wrap-around cover and Flash #214 delivers the width, Nick Cardy adds another fine cover to his total.

Jim Pabian adds to the “well-drawn Golden Age Funny Animal covers that more people should want” pile.

A great comic book cover matching each day of the year, 1 through 365. Please chime in with your favourite corresponding cover, from any era.

Walter Durajlija
Walter Durajlija

Walter Durajlija is an Overstreet Advisor and Shuster Award winner. He owns Big B Comics in Hamilton Ontario.

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Bud Plant
Bud Plant
4 years ago

Gorgeous! I’d forgotten what a great cover this was. Was Frazetta inspired here by Wally Wood’s EC work? All that zip-a-tone use, and the cratered look of the moon, could easily be Woodwork.

This depiction of Buck Rogers, the very young face looks back at the creature, reminds me that Buck was indeed a youngster. I think it was Chris who noted he looked like a 98-pounder in the previous back Frazetta cover. The strip pegs him at 20 years old with the first few panels, surprisingly, according to wikipedia. But my read of the strip puts him more like a smart but diminutive 15-16 year old. He was not a muscle-bound superhero, at least in the first couple decades of strips.

Robin Easterbrook
Robin Easterbrook
4 years ago

The very first panel of the Buck Rogers daily strip puts Buck at twenty years old and just having been “mustered” out of the air service. I expect that this demographic detail follows the first pulp story pretty closely although I don’t have it in front of me to check. He certainly wasn’t pictured as some muscle man but just an action oriented, fresh faced youth.

Scott VanderPloeg
Admin
4 years ago

The first two Buck Rogers dailies from 1929:comment image

Buck Rogers dailies 1 and 2

Chris Meli
4 years ago

Now total agreement and I appreciate the recognition of Flash. The Four Color a great companion for Air Pirates Funnies #1.

Easy to pick FF again for #215. A shoe-in for me as an octopus aficionado. Nothing in close competition but I like Captain America, House of Mystery, Strange Adventures, Superman, Unexpected (but “Chonk”?).

JOWA to Green Lantern’s take on Young Romance.

Gerald Eddy
Gerald Eddy
4 years ago

Another great grouping Walt! Thanks also to Scott for his inclusion of that very early Buck strip! When I was 13 I got the Buck Rogers book for Christmas and spent hours on it and an Orphan Annie compilation and my love of old comic strips started! It may be noted that Bucks adventures started in a couple of stories printed in the sci-fi pulp Amazing Stories at the end of the 20’s. It was a perfect subject for the comics pages which were only really starting to include serials! While beautifully rendered by Alex Raymond… Flash Gordon was created as a direct response to the genre that Buck Rogers established! Its unfortunate we don’t have public interest for comic strips like those today!

tim hammell
tim hammell
4 years ago

How much is that 100 Page Flash worth with it’s error cover, a million bucks? Can you spot the error?

Great Buck cover even though it’s his “smallest” appearance yet, love the ship, alien, moon and colour. At one time I did have that BIG book of Buck Rogers, lot of fun, should track down a copy again. Anybody have the current reprint hc series and what do you think? It’s be a lot of books to catch up on. Got the three Titan Books of Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon’s last year, beautiful.

Gerald Eddy
Gerald Eddy
4 years ago

Can we capitalize on misspellings Tim…

Klaus
Klaus
4 years ago

Every cover of that Flash would have the same error so probably just the ususl value. It’s like Marvel Two-in-One #1. In the little upper left hand corner box, they have Marvel Two-on-One, not a very fair fight. (:

tim hammell
tim hammell
4 years ago

Gerald, apparently works for stamps, money and books so why not? ; ) LoL There are some “error” comics (allegedly two separate comics mis-stapled into one) floating around eBay for a million $… : )