You say that your basis was not quality, but so far the distinctive characters that you have offered confidence, weight and fluidity which sound like quality judgments to me. Every artist has his good days and his bad days. Quality varies. But artist will tend to repeat how they handle what otherwise would be considered unimportant details of the drawing. It is those aspects that should be used in trying to determine attributions.

Often in single cases like this, it is difficult to prove or disprove whether Kirby supplied layouts to a studio artist. Depending on how rough a layout there maybe little evidence left to judge by. But when looking at larger samplings I believe a pattern emerges. I find many cases were the splash layout, or the panel layouts, or some pose was one generally not used by Kirby. There are much fewer cases where the layout looks like Kirby’s. Perhaps even more important then the low number of Kirby layouts found, are that they involved less frequently used artists and not the studio regulars. So for me the generalization, or what is sometimes referred to as the null hypothesis, is that Kirby did not supply layouts for the regular studio artists. That does not mean I deny the possibility that Kirby ever did such layouts, but that the burden of proof rests on the case for Kirby layouts. When for a particular example I cannot find good evidence that Kirby in fact supplied layouts, then I conclude he did not. And as I said before, I do not accept quality assessments as good evidence. In the case of this Charlie Chan splash I find no style or layout technique that indicates it was more likely done by Kirby then Infantino while I do find some evidence to the contrary. Therefore I do not attribute either the layout or pencils to Kirby.

I defer to you in this period of comic book exploration, but my basis was not on the quality of the page but the art in comparison to Infantino’s other, concurrent work on Charlie Chan. I may be wrong about my theory and would have to see more of Infantino’s work on the title, but judging by the examples shown here I would not easily ID Infantino on that splash page if a signature did not appear. And, as you have noted with Manny Stallman, even that is not positive proof.

As always an interesting and informative post. In regards to the first Charlie Chan splash signed by Infantino, is it possible Simon or Kirby provided a layout or design for that splash? It looks a little too confident to me and I don’t think it’s only due to the possible Simon inks. The characters have a weight and fluidity that one associates with Simon and Kirby. If Infantino was able to copy Simon and Kirby’s style so effortlessly at this point then why do the other Infantino splashes look so much weaker in comparison?

I have looked at Atlas Tales and as I said in my post the Altas art looks different from either of the two styles I find in the Prize comics. I have also seen a Stallman story in Captain Aero which at a glance looks more like the Atlas material. As for Benulis, that is an interesting suggestion but I am only familiar with his later work. I am sure all the evidence is trying to tell us something, I am just not sure what that is.

Scott,

Briefer’s presence in Charlie Chan certainly was a fortunate, if short lived event. Obviously there is more non-Frankenstein work out there because Briefer must have been doing work during the period from March 1952 to November 1954 during which Prize stopped publishing Frankenstein Comics.

As for Stallman, I don’t know. The fancifulness of the art is similar to stuff Ben benulis did, but I don’t know if they ever worked together. For a good handle of Stallman’s art you should lso have a look at his earliest stuff for Atlas. It had a similar line to this piece. He used to sign his name very small. There must be some samples on Atlas Tales and there is at least one story in the Marvel Materwoks rerpint of Strange Tales #1-10.