Image © DC Comics, Inc.

I spoke to Gaspar Saladino today and he told me he enjoyed the articles about his first DC lettering. He confirmed that this story, the first one in ROMANCE TRAIL #5 was his earliest DC job, it seemed familiar to him, and he thought my research was correct and well done. Needless to say, I’m pleased and relieved. Now, if anyone out there could get Gaspar’s earliest credits updated on the Grand Comics Database and his Wikipedia entry, that would be swell.

ADDED: Thanks to Ralf Haring for updating the GCD to include the information in my blog posts. Much appreciated!

All images © DC Comics, Inc.

When we spoke in mid December, Gaspar had put some doubt in my mind about JIMMY WAKELY being the first DC comic he worked on, so I did more research. I found a site that shows covers of all the comics published by the company in each month of each year. Looking through 1950 I came to this title, which I’d never seen or heard of before. It ran six issues from cover dates July-August 1949 through this one, May-June 1950. It’s DC’s first romance title, though just by two months, GIRLS’ LOVE STORIES came along shortly after. It was edited by Julie Schwartz, and is certainly a western romance comic, exactly what Gaspar had described. Issue 6 was published the same month as issue 5 of JIMMY WAKELY, where we’ve already seen Gaspar’s work. It looked like I’d hit the jackpot!

Perhaps because it covers two genres, inexpensive reading copies are scarce, but I was able to once again get scans from Michael T. Gilbert of splash pages and then full stories for issue 6, and I thank him for his help.

This splash page for the first story certainly has balloon and caption lettering that look like the work of Gaspar to me. Better yet, the art is by Carmine Infantino and Frank Giacoia (as per the Grand Comics Database). Gaspar remembered his first story being drawn by Carmine, so perhaps this was it.

I’m not sure what’s going on with that triangle representing A as the first letter of the caption, I can’t see what it’s meant to be, but the remaining letter forms certainly look like Gaspar’s work, though perhaps just a little less even that what we’ve seen so far. The story title is rather bland, and looks more like something Ira Schnapp might do than Gaspar, but notice the way the R is designed, like a P with the right leg added. This is a characteristic element of Gaspar’s title lettering throughout his career.

A detail from page 5 has a typical Gaspar burst balloon with all straight lines. The one slightly odd thing is the squared letter A’s in the word AVALANCHE, a variation which appears in this issue but not later work, and only on emphasized words.

On page 7 we find the first of several initial capitals with black shapes behind them, a little more rounded than what we’ve seen before, but quite similar.

And on page 10 we have some very Gaspar-ish sound effects. In all, I’m sure this story was lettered by Gaspar. And it wasn’t the only one in the issue!

The second story also looks like it has Gaspar’s lettering.  The art is again attributed to Infantino/Giacoia on the GCD, but with a question mark. Doesn’t look as much like their work to me, and I think it’s unlikely Julie would have run two stories by the same art team in the same issue and one after the other. Notice the R’s in the title with the same style as story one, and the black shape behind the initial capital.

This detail from page 3 has a very Gaspar sound effect and another of those initial capitals. It’s subtle, but I again see some slight unevenness in the letter forms perhaps suggesting that Gaspar was still learning to doing this.

Page 6 has this very typical Gaspar thought balloon and squared, bold I.

The next panel features one of those caption borders with zigzags, clearly tying the lettering style to examples we’ve looked at in earlier parts of this article. I don’t recall seeing anyone else but Gaspar do that, and it’s representative of the kind of energy he always adds to his work.

There was plenty of hard slogging for the letterer in those days, as Gaspar remembers. I believe the lettering on this page covers nearly 50% of the entire surface!

Here’s the third long story in the issue, once again I believe with Gaspar lettering. This title also looks like he was using the work of Ira Schnapp as a guide, but it’s not as well crafted as Ira’s work.

One more example of the zigzag caption line, and here I think the slightly uneven letter forms are more obvious. Don’t get me wrong, this is still great lettering, but I have to admit I feel a little better about my own early work after seeing that Gaspar didn’t lay pen to paper on his earliest stories with a fully developed professional lettering style. From this example, I think we can see him still working that out.

So, ROMANCE TRAIL 6 has three stories lettered by Gaspar, but are they the earliest? Michael T. Gilbert had sent me splash pages for all six issues, and while I didn’t see any sign of Saladino lettering in issues 1-4, there were two stories in issue 5 I thought might be by him. Michael was kind enough to send his largest scans of those stories, but unfortunately they aren’t as clear as the ones for issue 6.

I looked again on eBay, and this time found a low-grade copy of issue 5 with the logo stripped off, something done by newsstands to get credit for unsold copies. (They sent the stripped logos to the distributor for credit, and then sometimes still sold the defaced comics at lower prices, which must have happened here). As you can see, I bought it, and it arrived yesterday, just in time for me to make new scans for this article.

The first story in the book has art by Carmine Infantino and Joe Giella according to the GCD. It certainly looks like Infantino pencils to me. The story title is well done, if rather conservative. I think “A Molly Adams Story” is set in type.

A closer look at the caption shows a decorative T that is not as well done as later ones by Gaspar, but still has a creative approach, a black circle behind it. Again, the letterforms are a little uneven, perhaps a bit more so than the ones in issue 6. The handling of the emphasized DID is not typical of his later work, but many of the style points that indicate Gaspar’s letter forms to me are here.

We can certainly say the story had tons of “copy” or things needing lettering, as you can see on this page. There are some details to notice here. The first speech balloon has three quoted words underlined. No doubt they were underlined in the script, but in those pre-computer days that usually meant it should be lettered italic or slanted. I made a similar novice mistake once on an early job for Julie Schwartz, and he came to the production room at DC, where I was working on staff, to tell me “NEVER underline!” I’m not sure why these weren’t fixed before the pages went to the printer, either Julie missed it, or he wasn’t yet set on that rule. The words that are emphasized are uneven in size, look how big ACTUALLY is at lower left. The thought balloon border in that panel uses smaller ovals than usual for Gaspar, and they aren’t as well shaped as later ones, more evidence he was still learning.

Here’s what I’d call the “smoking gun” of my research: a zigzag caption line found on page 6, one of several in the story. If there was any doubt in my mind that Gaspar lettered it, this dispelled it. I’m convinced I’ve found the very first story lettered by Gaspar for DC! Because it’s not typical of his later work in some ways, I might have missed it if I hadn’t worked my way back like this, so my research has paid off!

The other piece in the issue I think Gaspar lettered is this one-page filler of illustrated verse with art by Alex Toth. There’s a very nice western title at the top, and then four sections of verse in all caps. then lower case.

The upper case letter forms are very much in Gaspar’s style, and the lower case, while less practiced, shows lots of promise, and puts him on the road to the signature upper and lower case handwriting style that Gaspar used throughout his career.

I called Gaspar again a few days ago to tell him about my new research. “See if this rings a bell,” I told him, “a comic called ROMANCE TRAIL, combining romance and western themes.”

With only a moment’s hesitation he replied, “Yes! That sounds like it. I think you’re right! And the art was by Carmine?” I told him it was on the earliest story. Gaspar agreed it all sounded correct. I said I’d be presenting my evidence in these blog articles, and he could see it there soon. “Okay, I’ll be interested to read that,” he said, and added, “and don’t be afraid to tear me apart, tell it like it is.” While I’ve tried to be honest in my comments here, even starting out I feel Gaspar was way ahead of all the letterers I’ve known. No tearing apart required!

One interesting thing to consider is the timing of this work. Issue 5 of ROMANCE TRAIL was cover-dated March-April 1950. Comics regularly hit the newsstands two months ahead of their cover date for two reasons. First, it would make them seem fresh and new longer, and second it told the sellers when it was time to take unsold copies off the stands. So, this issue would have appeared in January, 1950, and be pulled off in March or April, in time for the next bimonthly issue. I don’t know what the lead time was for separations, printing and distribution, but I’d guess the finished art had to be sent to the color separators at least one month before the on-sale time. That puts the date of actual work being done on the book back into November of 1949 or earlier.

So, if this evidence is accurate, Gaspar’s memory of starting work at DC in 1951 is off by about two years. It also means that the lettering legend, revered by so many of us who came after him, has now produced work in EIGHT decades, from the 1940s to the 2010s! And he’s not done yet. Gaspar told me he recently lettered a story for Dark Horse Comics. I’ll be looking forward to that, and will probably blog about it.

Hope you’ve enjoyed this trip back into comics and lettering history, similar articles can be found on the COMICS CREATION page of my blog.

 

 

 

All images © DC Comics, Inc.

The more I looked at the lettering in JIMMY WAKELY #7, the more I felt convinced that Gaspar had lettered three of the stories in it, even though the man himself didn’t think so. What could I use for evidence to bolster my case? I’d already written about the story above from STRANGE ADVENTURES #13, cover dated Oct. 1951 in THIS article. The art is by Alex Toth (who also did many stories for JIMMY WAKELY), and I knew it had to be lettered by Gaspar. Why? Artist Steve Leialoha owns an unused version of this first page with a note to Gaspar on it! Here’s the page:

And here’s the note to Gaspar larger:

As it turned out, the revised first page didn’t include this sign Alex was writing to Gaspar about, but he clearly knew who would be lettering the story. So I decided I should look for style clues in the pages of “Artist of Other Worlds.” Writer/artist and comics historian Michael T. Gilbert was kind enough to send me scans of the entire story (he’d provided the one I already had of the first page), and lots of style clues emerged. But first, let me point out the story title above as lettered. Once again it doesn’t look at all like Gaspar’s work. Still quite puzzling, but at least consistent with the JIMMY WAKELY stories!

Here’s a detail from the second story page. While the scan is a little wonky, the similarities to the JIMMY WAKELY work are clear. Same initial cap style, same wide lettering with all the characteristic Saladino style points. Same wide balloon tails.

On this detail from a later page, we see the same kind of radio balloon used in the JW stories.

This full story page has more radio balloons, the same initial cap style in the first caption, which also ends in the same kind of scrollwork. I felt I had my case. I made large printouts of both the “Desert Justice” story from JW and this one from SA on my 11 by 17-inch printer and marked them up with notes pointing out all the similarities, and mailed them to Gaspar.

It took him a while to get to them, but when he’d gone over the pages he called to tell me he thought I was absolutely correct. It WAS his work in both, except for the story titles, which is just as puzzling to him as to me. That left only the matter of the date. “You know,” I said, “The STRANGE ADVENTURES issue is dated October, 1951, but that meant it was on the newsstands in August, and likely lettered at least a month or two before that.” Gaspar admitted I must be right. When I pointed out the stories in JIMMY WAKELY #7, cover dated Sept.-Oct. 1950 would have been lettered no later than June of that year, he reluctantly agreed he must have started at DC earlier than he remembered.

Over the weeks this process was going on I continued to look for more reference on JIMMY WAKELY, and on eBay I hit the jackpot. Someone was selling a CD filled with scans of the entire 19 issues for a few dollars! While of questionable legal standing, this was something I had to have, and I bought it. The CD arrived after I had the above conversation with Gaspar, and as I was starting to assemble material for these articles. I began going through the issues page by page. Again, the scans vary in quality, though all are readable at least, and most are clear enough to see the lettering style.

Here’s a sample of the lettering from the first issue. There are a few minor similarities to Gaspar’s work like the long central stroke in the S, but overall it’s very different with narrower, rounder letters, a G with a serif, and so on. Much the same was true for all of issues 1-4. Then I opened issue 5, and my jaw dropped. There were four main stories, and every one of them seemed to be lettered by Gaspar! I had to have a better look, and soon found another reading copy on eBay that wasn’t too expensive. When it came, the actual comic did nothing but confirm my opinion. Here are some scans.

Story one splash page, art by Alex Toth and Joe Giella. Look at that thought balloon’s wide ovals, and the style of the initial capital Y in the caption. The title, while a bit odd, is closer to something I could see Gaspar doing, especially if he hadn’t quite figured out title lettering yet.

Here’s a closer look. The letterforms are very much in Gaspar’s style: wide with mostly straight strokes. The G has a straight right side but no serif, the C is half an oval, the S has that very long center stroke, and so on.

Here’s a detail from page 2 of the story with a very Gaspar radio balloon and another of those open initial caps with black brush shapes behind it.

A detail from page 4 with an interesting very bold and square I, and notice the unusual zig-zags in the caption border. It’s the sort of thing I’ve used to denote a radio or TV caption, but that’s not the case here. I think Gaspar just put it in as a design element to break up that dull straight line. Remember this detail, we’ll get back to it.

A detail from page 5 showing Gaspar’s two most common small balloon styles. Rounded for speech, large ovals for thoughts.

A sound effect from page 6, very Gaspar, especially that angular S!

Are you getting the picture? Here’s the splash page from the second story I believe Gaspar lettered with art by Alex Toth and Bernard Sachs (all art credits are from the Grand Comics Database). The title and logo on this one are by Gaspar too, I’m sure, and look at those elegant scroll captions.

The third story Gaspar lettered, again with a title that looks more in his style, quite creative in the use of broken dry-brush strokes for SHERIFF and YEAR. (The logo is probably an existing one by Ira Schnapp.) The art is by Joe Kubert and Bernard Sachs.

The fourth story has a different style to the initial cap and the title is not as well done or very typical of Gaspar’s work, but again, perhaps he hadn’t quite figured out the best ways to do titles yet. Art by Alex Toth and Frank Giacoia.

Here’s another of those captions with a few zig-zags, and some nice open lettering from the fourth story.

And another sound effect that’s classic Gaspar work.

So, I was convinced that Gaspar had lettered these stories, but before I had a chance to talk to him about it, my research was interrupted by Hurricane Sandy. Ellen and I evacuated to my mother’s place for a few days, then brought her here. Gaspar and his wife live on Long Island in an area hit by the storm, and he wasn’t reachable by phone or email for a few weeks, which had me worried. I finally heard from Clem Robins that the Saladinos had been sent down to Florida by their children, and would stay there until after Thanksgiving.

When Gaspar was home and I finally was able to talk to him on the phone, I told him about my new discovery, but he was skeptical. He’d been looking at the samples I’d sent from Jimmy Wakely 7 again, and wasn’t sure he’d done them. “The STRANGE ADVENTURE story is definitely me,” he said, “but I don’t remember working on JIMMY WAKELY.” I had to say I felt he was wrong, but I probed for anything he could remember about his first lettering work for Julie Schwartz at DC. “It was a romantic western,” he said. “I think the first story I did was drawn by Carmine Infantino. All I remember is there was tons of captions and dialogue.”

After we talked I thought about this and decided to do more research. Could there be another comic I was missing that contained Gaspar’s first DC lettering? The answer will follow in Part 3 of this article. Similar articles can be found on the COMICS CREATION page of my blog.

 

All images © DC Comics, Inc.

It’s no secret that my favorite letterer and role model in lettering is Gaspar Saladino, and lately I’ve been talking to him about his early days in comics. Gaspar has said in past interviews that his first work for DC was lettering western romance stories for editor Julius Schwartz. Creator credits for comics are usually a matter of guesswork for stories of that era, and educated guesses can be found on the Grand Comics Database, I checked under “Letterer” and “Gaspar Saladino” and “sort by date.” The chronological first lettering credit they have for Gaspar is for ALL-STAR COMICS #33 cover-dated Feb.-March 1947. That’s way too early, Gaspar was in the service then, so it’s a wrong guess. The next listing is for issue 7 of the comic JIMMY WAKELY that ran for 19 issues, cover-dated Sept.-Oct. 1949 to July-Aug. 1952. The series is about a singing cowboy, so I surmised that might qualify as a romantic western. I thought it might be interesting to see if I could identify the first work by Gaspar on the title.

ADDED: Thanks to Ralf Haring, Gaspar’s listings on the GCD have been updated to reflect the research in these blog posts, which I appreciate. If you’d like to follow my line of research, please read on rather than checking the GCD!

Gaspar was born in 1926 in Brooklyn, NY. For his high school education, he attended the School of Industrial Art (later the High School of Art and Design) in Manhattan, commuting by subway from Brooklyn. The school was attended by a number of other artists who made careers in comics including Bernard Krigstein, Carmine Infantino, Joe Orlando, and Gaspar’s classmate in the class of 1945, inker Joe Giella. Later graduates included Sy Barry, Alex Toth, John Romita Sr. and Dick Giordano. While in high school, Gaspar did a some inking for the Lloyd Jacquet studio, a packager of comics for various publishers, though he doesn’t remember any specific titles or features. Jacquet was clearly looking for new talent at the school, and was helpful to Gaspar in getting him a desk job in the Army when he enlisted after graduating. That experience provided Gaspar with some familiarity with several aspects of comics work, including the lettering, as in those days (and for many more decades) the lettering would have been already on the pages when he inked them. He says he didn’t do any lettering at that time, though.

Gaspar was in the service about two years, stationed in Japan in a public relations job that didn’t involve art at all. When he got home in 1947, Gaspar told me he was out pounding the pavement looking for work. At some point he put together sample comics pages that he drew, lettered and inked and took them to DC Comics, hoping to find work there. This seems like a natural idea, as several of his high school classmates were already working for the company. Sol Harrison, then in charge of production, showed the samples around to the editors. Julie Schwartz said that, while he didn’t like Gaspar’s art enough to hire him for that, he did like his lettering, and offered him regular lettering work. Gaspar was happy to get it.

When he started, Gaspar told me, they sat him in the Production room between logo and cover lettering man Ira Schnapp and then production artist Mort Drucker (later of MAD fame), and he began lettering work for Julie, and soon other editors like Robert Kanigher and Mort Weisinger. It was freelance work paying $2 a page, but he did it in the office five days a week, lettering about nine pages a day on average, or 45 pages a week. At the end of the week he’d fill out a voucher for the work and get a check. Gaspar said $90 a week pay was good money in those days, and he was quite happy with his new job.

I suspect having on-premises letterers was a fairly new thing for DC then. Ira Schnapp had not been in his staff job for long, but was now busy doing most of the company’s logos, cover lettering, house ads, and some story pages as well. Gaspar told me there were two students from his old high school that were also coming in to do lettering, probably after school. One was a young man named Artie Secunda, the other was a young lady, he doesn’t remember her name. From the early days of comics and in comic strips, lettering was usually provided by the artist, or more often an assistant, but it was part of the product delivered by the artist. Some comics packagers or “shops” had guys specializing in lettering, like Howard Ferguson at Joe Simon’s shop and Abe Kanegson at Will Eisners, but in general lettering was seen as an entry level job one would do on the way toward inking and eventually pencilling. Many artists who came into the comics business in the early days followed that route.

If there were errors or changes needed in the lettering, staff production folks (like Mort Drucker) could do them if there wasn’t time to send it back to the artist, but I can see how editors would benefit from having the lettering done in-house where they could read over it and have changes made on the spot either before or after the art was inked.  At DC the inker was often NOT the penciller, further breaking up the art chores into different assembly-line jobs. In essence, DC was creating a production shop of their own, along the lines of those run by Lloyd Jacquet, Joe Simon and Will Eisner, among others. The difference was, DC had more control over the process by hiring each individual worker in the assembly line. Gaspar doesn’t recall anyone else doing freelance lettering at the time he started, though there might have been some working for other editors, and not in-house.

Knowing the time period and the title, I thought I should be able to identify Gaspar’s seminal lettering on JIMMY WAKELY. First I had to find scans of the comics. Some were available online, but not all the issues, and the scans were of varying quality. Of the issues I could view that way, the earliest pages that looked like Gaspar’s work were indeed from issue 7. Wanting a closer look, I ordered a well-worn and not very collectible copy on eBay, above.

Here’s a detail from the first story in the issue, clearly NOT by Gaspar. The letters are all quite narrow, the S is curved throughout, the G has a serif on the bottom, and the letters are generally not very even.

The title page is also not him, nor does it look to me like the work of Ira Schnapp, a possible candidate. GCD lists the letterer as Morris Waldinger, but that seems very unlikely, as he hadn’t started working for the company yet, I believe, so I’d call that a wrong guess.

The detail above, and the one at the top of this article are from issue 7′s second story, “Desert Justice,” with art by Alex Toth and Bernard Sachs (all art credits here are from the GCD) and clearly look like Gaspar to me. The letters are wide and even, well formed. The S has a long straight central stroke, the G is squared on the right side, the U is square at the bottom, the loops of the P and R are narrow, the question marks and exclamation points are large. Those are just some of the clues that I look for in Gaspar’s work. In the first example above there’s a scroll caption with a notched end. The radio balloon has large straight points. In the second example, the thought balloon has large loops and a trail of oval pointer bubbles. The other balloon tails are wide. Above all, I was impressed with how consistent and professional this work is! My earliest lettering is pretty awful even compared to what I did a year later, so to see Gaspar starting out at such a high level made me admire his talent all the more. I asked Gaspar if he had studied lettering in high school or later, and he said no. “It was just something that came naturally to me,” he told me.

Another detail from the second story shows an open initial capital that sits on what look like black strokes made with a square-tipped brush, though I’m sure they’re actually outlined in pen and filled in. This is one of the characteristic initial capital styles I found in Gaspar’s early work, another is in the open letter B above, though that’s more typical of all lettering for the time.

Story three was probably lettered by the same person as story one, not Gaspar, but story four,  “The Stranger from Sunburst Bend” with art by Gil Kane and Bob Lander, again looks like his work, including the story title in a handsome scroll.

The above example from that story even has some upper and lower case letters on a map that I find very convincingly Gaspar.

Story five again looks like Saladino lettering. There’s the same initial cap style, and sound effects very familiar to me from his later work. So, even though I hadn’t seen all the issues yet, I was pretty confident issue 7 had three early examples of Gaspar’s lettering.

The only problem was the story titles. Except for “The Stranger from Sunburst Bend,” they didn’t look like Gaspar’s work. This is quite puzzling. Possibly editor Julie Schwartz didn’t have confidence in Gaspar’s title work and had someone else letter them. Or perhaps Gaspar was still finding his way with lettering styles for titles on this western comic.

So, with this much knowledge, I emailed scans of a few of these full pages from issue 7 to Gaspar to see what he thought. “Parts of it do look like my work,” he told me, “but those titles are definitely not my style. No, I don’t think I did these stories.” And when I told him the date of the issue, Sept.-Oct. 1950, he thought it was too early. He remembered starting at DC in 1951. This set me back a bit. More research was needed, and I’ll continue with that next time.

Other similar articles can be found on the COMICS CREATION page of my blog.