Posted in: Comics, Heritage Sponsored, Vintage Paper | Tagged: golden age, Matt Baker

Matt Baker's South Sea Girl in Seven Seas Comics #3, up for Auction

Matt Baker's first South Sea Girl cover for Seven Seas Comics #3 would lead to work on Phantom Lady, Rulah and beyond.

An artist who became legendary for his cover artwork in particular, Matt Baker had only done six of them before his first South Sea Girl cover, on Seven Seas Comics #3.  What's more, this piece is his first true Good Girl cover, on a series that very likely helped raise his profile in the comic book industry substantially, leading to his work for Fox Feature Syndicate and beyond.  A key moment in Matt Baker's career, there's a CGC 4.0 copy of Seven Seas Comics #3 (Universal Phoenix Feature, 1947) up for auction in the 2024 July 18 The Matt Baker Comics Showcase Auction #40267 at Heritage Auctions.

South Sea Girl was Baker's first work on a female feature character since his collaborative artwork involvement in Sheena a year and a half earlier, and it's not unlikely that was Samuel "Jerry" Iger's plan.  Versatile author Manning Lee Stokes (June 21, 1911 – January 5, 1976) wrote the South Sea Girl stories in a way that allowed Baker to showcase the artistic strengths for which he would become famous.  After attending Indiana University, Stokes became the managing editor of the Morristown Herald from that paper's founding in 1936.  From 1939, he wrote serialized fiction for newspapers via the McClure Syndicate and others.  By the time he co-created South Sea Girl, he had written three novels for Phoenix Press (no relation to Iger's Universal Phoenix Features, it seems), a publisher known for its salacious content and rock-bottom pay rates.  Stokes has a handful of credits in comics besides his South Sea Girl work, including Classics Illustrated, and perhaps worked again with Baker on Rulah in Zoot Comics.  Most Famously, Stokes wrote the digest-size graphic novel The Case of the Winking Buddha, with artwork by Charles Raab and published by St. John in 1950.  Stokes had become a prolific paperback novelist by that time, producing an incredible range of work from the late 1940s through the 1970s.

With his Fiction House assignments beginning to taper off, Baker would begin getting work from Victor Fox while the Seven Seas Comics series was in progress.  An important moment in Matt Baker's career, there's a CGC 4.0 copy of Seven Seas Comics #3 (Universal Phoenix Feature, 1947) up for auction in the 2024 July 18 The Matt Baker Comics Showcase Auction #40267 at Heritage Auctions.

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