GOLDEN AGE COMICS -- The Human Bomb

Police Comics # 1, 1941, had the distinction of introducing Plastic Man by Jack Cole and The Human Bomb by Paul Gustavson (Paul Carroll).  Although The Human Bomb ended in 1946, Gustavson created some memorable stories filled with saboteurs, subversives, Nazi spies and German U-Boat Captains!

In 1977, as a tribute to Paul Gustavson, who died April 27, 1977, C.C. Beck re-created The Human Bomb story drawn by Gustavson from Police Comics # 1.

"I had quite a struggle working in a style so different than my own," C.C. Beck commented, "Gustavson put twice as much copy and drawing into each page as I ever did, and sometimes his habit of making each panel a separate piece of art, each quite beautifully drawn, seemed to get in the way of his storytelling.  There was a good story there... violent, cruel and typical of the way we looked at the world in those days.  But it was confoundedly hard for me to find!  I kept getting lost in all the tipped perspectives and the elaborate settings and the flying figures which kept leaping out of the borders and off the pages.

C.C. Beck

"Some of the original features of Gustavson's work such as his detailed shading and his loving delineation of textures and his constant changing of his viewpoint I was quite unable to reproduce.  My mind just doesn't work that way!  But I loved his hero -- a guy wearing a baggy suit that looked like it had been dipped in cement!

"I found it funny that the 'famous explosives expert' is smoking a pipe while working on his super explosive. A wonder the whole story didn't end in panel 2!"