Polite Dissent

For the last subject of Flashback Week 2006, I thought I’d take a look at Ben Casey #4. It features another strongly moralistic story of the Ben Casey standard: A street thug moves into a new neighborhood and begins terrorizing the resident. He sends one young boy to the hospital with a crushed skull. The boy’s brother goes looking for revenge and ends up getting shot by the thug. In a scene almost identical to the much maligned one from Detective Comics #814, the police use the wounded patient as bait to lure the thug to the hospital. In the end it is Dr. Casey who sudues and captures the criminal in an operating room.

The reason I’m mentioning this book is the art. For starters, take a look at the thug. Look familiar? Tell me that’s not Sean Connery (with a few extra warts). And that one fight scene sure looks like Sean is taking on Elvis.

The art is clearly just phoned in on this comic. The few times the artist has to show a face that is not obviously light-boxed or cut-and-pasted (literally, this was 1963), it is horribly drawn and carries no resemblance to the appearance of the same character just the panel before.