Johnny Thunder

I have always been a big fan of DC‘s westerns from the 50s. Although I passed them by as a wee one for the capes and cowls adventures in Action, Adventure and World’s Finest. I greatly enjoyed the western advenures of charactes such as Matt Savage, Johnny Thunder, Foley of the Fighting 5th and Nighhawk when DC reprinted them in the early 70s. In fact I was lucky enough to pick up some of the actual early Silver Age books at the few conventions I went to. The books featured great work by Infantino, Toth, Kane and Barry during that transition period from the atomic age to the second great age of heroes. I always thought it was ironic that Marvel featured ongoing adventures of Western Heroes after DC closed the barn door on their characters. Finding pages of the DC western heroes is pretty tough, but here is what I have picked up so far.

There is an interesting story behind three of these Johnny Thunder Secret Origin pages. If you go to the book you’ll see that Alan Weiss inked the first three pages and the rest of the story was inked by Dick Giordano.

When Dick offered me the first three penciled pages I happily bought them and took Dick up on his offer to ink them.

But this leads to some interesting questions, since I own the original pencil pages, how did the first three get inked by Alan? Did Alan redo those three pages, did he lightbox the pages? Was Dick the original inker and for some reason Alan had to ink the first three pages? Why were the first three pages originally not inked by Alan or Dick?

It sounds like a great untold story for an issue off Back Issue. If you know the story behind this story, feel free to let me know. Enjoy