Bulls Eye #4 Pg 29- Ghost Town Ambush Pg 7

This was a very interesting pick up for me recently and will be the first of four art posts from the story Ghost Town Ambush in Bulls Eye #4 from Mainline Publishing 1955. My descriptions will all be interconnected, so please follow along starting here. This pick up was inspired by a fellow collector who had posted multiple Two Gun Kid commissions. Having never collected Western pieces before, I took inspiration from seeing a wealth of great art. Memories of my youth flooded my imagination, which included times that my father and I would bond around the TV as well as the reenactments I would play out in the wilds of the Southern California desert. This post will chronicle the research I embark upon regarding Mainline Publication history, artist history, art techniques, lettering, and more. I may possibly even shed a little light onto this not so very well-known storyline as well as touch on some very important comic history surrounding this piece. Hopefully with the help of fellow collectors and the 2023 release of The Best of Simon & Kirby’s Mainline Comics by Two Morrows publication we may even be able to solve the mystery of this unknown art. I would also like to thank Harry Mendryk as well as the Las Vegas CAF collectors’ group for allowing me to bounce ideas off them and see what direction to next proceed regarding my research. Also, a big thank you goes out to the Jack Kirby Museum for your wealth of online education and Two Morrows Publishing for your article by Robert Lee Beerbohm entitled “The Mainline Comics Story: An Initial Examination”, which was published in The Jack Kirby Collector Issue# 26, Aug, 1999.

I would like to start by stating that the printed version of this very page can be found on the Jack Kirby Museum website and thus there must be at least some historical importance to this piece. However, before I get into the minutia of the artwork, I would like brush upon the history surrounding the publication company that created Bulls Eye comics. (Please note: The following is the best recounting of the research I performed and thus if I make any mistakes feel free to comment as such for clarification.) If this is your first-time hearing of Mainline Publishing, then you are in the same place I was when I began my research. Yet, Mainline publishing was no ordinary failed attempt at a publishing company. This was the publishing house created by Jack Kirby and Joe Simon. Furthermore, had history played out differently, Mainline Publishing might have been a household name as powerful as Marvel, or DC. However, their attempts to break into the publishing industry world were stymied by events outside their control. It just so happened that an article in the Ladies Home Journal, which was a powerful literary source for many mothers throughout the nation, took offense against the content that was being published in many comic books. The article was written by a psychiatrist named Fredrick Wertham and was an excerpt from his book entitled Seduction of the Innocent. This ill-fated series of events helped lead to a 1954 Senate Hearing before the subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, which later led to comic bans throughout the country. During the senate hearings Bill Gaines, from EC comics, made a spectacle on a televised hearing before the subcommittee that led to the downfall of EC publishing. The resulting EC insolvency had a rippling effect on their distributor Leader News, which also had to close their business. Mainline Publishing became yet another casualty of the senate hearings when their distributor, Leader News, became insolvent. Mainline Publishing only produced 17 comics in total on 4 separate titles to include Foxhole, Police Trap, In Love and Bulls Eye. This piece happens to be from one of the 17 comics ever produced under the Mainline name. Also of note is the fact that it was the Senate Hearing on Juvenile Delinquency that eventually led to the formation of the Comics Code.

Please continue along with the next post diving further into research closer related to the actual artwork. The next topic will include my questioning of the Grand Comics Database listing and connect the dots between the dealer site, GCD, and the Jack Kirby Museum. I also got to speak with a well-documented Kirby collector Harry Mendryk as well as dive into a crash course in inking techniques and artistic styles.