Part One.
Mandrake the Magician started in 1934. The feature was created by Lee Falk, who also created The Phantom. He wrote both strips to his death in 1999.
Falk drew the strip’s opening weeks himself. Here's Mandrake’s first appearance:
from "The Cobra", 1934
Falk used his own face as the model for Mandrake's.
A couple of weeks in the art was taken over by Phil Davis. In the 30s Davis used an Alex Raymond-influenced style, similar to Ray Moore’s early style on The Phantom. (Moore had been Davis’s assistant.)
from "The Cobra", 1934
from "The Return of the Clay Camel", 1936 Jane is being hoaxed.
from "Prince Paolo the Tyrant", 1937 (Sunday; the final panel is from the next Sunday)
In the 40s Davis shifted to a clear, linear style. His art became a little stiff, but I still like it.
from "Baron Kord", 1942-43
from "Roc Island", 1946 (Sunday)
from "The Castaway", 1964 (Sunday)
Davis’s wife Martha started assisting him on the strip during the war. After the war she continued to assist him, drawing Narda. Martha had been a fashion illustrator, and Narda’s fashionable costumes were a feature of the strip in this period.
from "Baron Kord", 1942-43
After Davis died in late 1964 Martha pencilled the strip for a few months. Fred Fredericks took over in mid-1965. His early work on the strip was in a Dan/Sy Barry style.
from "The Astro-Pirates", 1966 (Sunday)
But he was soon using a style somewhat like Don Heck's without Heck's weaknesses. Later his work became more impressionistic.He remained on the strip until 2013, writing it after Falk died in 1999.
This sequence is the opening of one of the first Mandrake stories I saw. The story's approach - Mandrake encounters a confounding mystery - is very characteristic. The stranger's weight turns out to have an SF explanation.
from "Heavy", 1976 (Sunday sequence)
The third strip in this next sequence is the earliest instance I can remember seeing of Mandrake using his powers. The image from the final panel stuck with me all my life. I must have been eight or nine, and didn't know Mandrake's feats were illusions.
from "Prairie Man", 1976 (Sunday sequence)
Mandrake also fought ordinary crooks. Stories of this kind were particularly common in the Fredericks years. In this sequence Mandrake and Lothar have been blackmailed into stealing a famous painting:
from "Mr Ttazz", 1977-78 (Sunday sequence)
According to the Mandrake wiki here Alfred Bester may have ghost-written stories during WWII. It says Frank Thorne and Bob Fujitani each ghost-drew a week in 1966 when Fredericks was ill.
All scans from The Australian Women's Weekly. I had to reconstruct some of the strips as the magazine sometimes rearranged them to fit its format.
This post displaced the thread Comics Guide for Jan. 6, 2016 from the homepage.
Replies
Nice job, Luke! Perhaps you posted this research to co-incide with the Hermes Press release of the first volume of complete King Comics Mandrake yesterday...? I was a bit surprised to see it yesterday because, according to my notes, it was only two weeks behind the solicit date. A closer inspection, though, reveals that the volume solicited for February 2 release was in fact the first volume of Mandrake Sundays. We'll probably see that one in midsummer; the volume that shipped yesterday was solicited so far it the past it fell off my calendar.A second volume of King Mandrake comic books has beem solicited for March 16 (which means we shouls see it around September).
Anyway, I have only one of the comics in yesterday's collection and am looking forward to reading the rest.
Yes. The Captain mentioned the collection in the comics guide and I said I'd post some strips in the Anything thread, but I found I had too much to say. There are more posts to come.
Thanks for the kind words. I didn't know Hermes Press was also doing strip collections. If I'd heard it, I'd forgotten.
Oh, yes. Check out their web-site here
Their publications usually arrive six months or so behind their Previews solicit date due to their being shipped literally on a "slow boat from China" (their books are printed in China, anyway).
I ordered a Mandrake book a couple of years ago. Dunno if it's the same one, or if Amazon canceled it, or what. Must investigate.
The women drawn by Martha Davis look like those drawn by Wayne Boring in the 1950s, especially Lois Lane. Is it possible we've discovered a swipe?
I am now several stories in to the collection of Mandrake Sundays released by Titan Press last week. (Hermes Press has so far released one volume of Mandrake comic books from the 1960s.) To say that I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of these Sunday pages would be an understatement. I have a few collections of early Phantom Sundays and was expecting Mandrake to be of similar quality. I couldn’t have been more wrong. As Luke mentioned above, Phil Davis used an Alex Raymond-influenced style when he took over the dailies. That holds true for the Sundays as well. As will reading the first volume of Alex Raymond Flash Gordon Sundays, so too can one flip from the front to the back and see Phil Davis’ style become increasingly sophisticated from week to week.
The stories are quite fanciful and there’s little internal consistency or logic to how Mandrake’s powers actually work (most of the time they are described as simple hypnotism, yet he accomplishes some feats, such as levitation, which cannot be attributed to hypnotism), but the illustration is so breathtaking it doesn’t really make any difference. Next time you’re in your LCS, I suggest you give it a look. I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon or Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant or Burne Hogarth’s Tarzan.
Ray Moore used a detailed style on The Phantom at the start, but he shifted to a simpler style coming into the 40s. I'm not on top of exactly when. Falk's writing also got cosier with time. The daily strip started in 1936, but the Sundays only commenced in 1939. When Moore was drafted in 1942 his successor was his assistant, Wilson McCoy, whose style was still more cartoony. Moore returned to the strip after the war, but apparently he yielded the dailies back to McCoy quickly and the Sundays within a few years. My hat-tip to this site for credits and dates.
Nice site. Thanks for the link.