Wednesday, May 09, 2007

40 Years Ago Today From DC Comics -- Adventures of Jerry Lewis #101

Adventures of Jerry Lewis #101 (On Sale: May 9, 1967) has a strange Bob Oksner cover. What is strange about it is that Oksner did the cover and not the interior artist.

Inside we have "Jerry the Astronut" written by Arnold Drake and drawn by Neal Adams. This is Neal's first book-length story for DC and only his second piece of comic book work at DC (Neal did a three-month stint at Archie a few years earlier and had also just started doing work for the Warren horror magazines, Eerie and Creepy). Given that he came from the Ben Casey strip, Jerry Lewis seems like a strange book to be doing. I found this in an interview with Adams.
"...that (Jerry Lewis and Bob Hope) was my best money in comic books. I could pencil ten pages in a day. I could ink ten pages in a day. And when I did the realistic stuff I only did two pages a day so there was no comparison. It was the best money I could make but that wasn't really what I wanted to do."
I've never seen the Jerry Lewis work Neal did, but I own most of the Bob Hope stuff. I'll show some interior pages when we get to that next month. It's interesting stuff.

Edited by Murray Boltinoff.

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