Number 455


"Dey say it's hanuted!"


Emmanuel "Mac" Raboy was a top cartoonist, drawing Captain Marvel Jr. and Green Lama. He drew the Flash Gordon Sunday strips from 1946 until he died in 1967. At Fawcett he worked with Jack Binder, who ran a shop that provided artwork for comics. I talked with Jack in 1970 and he told me that "Raboy was talented, just slow." Apparently a perfectionist, he was also temperamental and could tear up a job he didn't like. Another story I heard about Raboy many years ago is that he moonlighted drawing comics while in the Navy during World War II. He had very little space on ship to draw, so drew his comic book pages the same size as the printed page. That looks like what happened with "The Punching Polties" from Master Comics #40, July 1943.

There's no telling why the speech balloon was changed on page 9, panel 3, to a crude paste-up misspelling "haunted" as "hanuted." You've got to wonder where in the production phase this happened, but it might have been done by poltergeists.