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Friday, May 19, 2006

Irwin Allen's 'The Lost World' by Gil Kane Alex Toth

In 1960, Irwin Allen produced the 'The Lost World' starring Claude Raines, Michael Rennie, and David Hedison ('Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea'). To help promote the movie Dell Comics produced a comic adaptation with art by Gil Kane (pencils) as part of the “Four Colors Movie Titles” book (#1145). (Amigo Steve Bissette assures me that the art is by Alex Toth. That was my first thought but the 'net said otherwise -- so, never trust everything you read on the web!)

Each month this title presented an adaptation of a different movie or TV show showing at the time. Dell never paid their artists or writers the top dollar offered by other publishers so the work produced by the artists almost always had a ‘rushed’ quality to it. However, the artists experienced little to no editorial interference and usually used this freedom to at least tell a good story.

Here are some of the more interesting pages from the book that also condense the story into 6 pages:
(CLICK ON EACH IMAGE TO ENLARGE AND READ)








If you liked these samples you can download the whole book as a VERY LARGE pdf courtesy of Hyperdave at Datajunkie.

As for Gil Kane, he would go on to fame in the 60’s as the artist who would revitalize The Atom and Green Lantern for DC Comics, and become Marvel Comics top cover artist in the 70’s.