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Story Behind Fantastic Comics' Most Iconic Lou Fine Cover, at Auction

Fantastic Comics #3 might be Lou Fine's most famous cover art, but the story behind it happened in Fantastic Comics #4.

Published Sun, 17 Sep 2023 09:47:06 -0500

As every vintage collector knows, a great cover can have a tremendous impact on the value of a vintage comic book. The cover of Fantastic Comics #3 by artist Lou Fine and published by Victor Fox makes that issue one of the most sought-after comic books of the Golden Age. It's a beautifully rendered and detailed cover by one of the best artists of the Golden Age on a rare issue of a historically important series. But the Fantastic Comics series overall has a number of other great covers by Lou Fine and others, and excellent stories by the likes of Alex Blum, Don Rico, and Fletcher Hanks, among others.

More to the point, the story that inspired that incredible Fantastic Comics #3 robot cover by Lou Fine is not in that issue at all — it's in Fantastic Comics #4. While there's no copy of the fabled issue #3 in this particular auction, there's a chance to get a copy of Fantastic Comics #4 (Fox, 1940) CGC VG/FN 5.0 Cream to off-white pages and other tough issues of the historically important Fantastic Comics series up for auction in the 2023 September 28 The Fox Comics Showcase Auction #40239 at Heritage Auctions.

Fantastic Comics #4 (Fox, 1940) interior Samson story.

Whether the issue #4 Samson story or the issue #3 Lou Fine cover that it matches ran out of order, or the mismatch occurred for some other reason, we might never know. But it's interesting to note that the interior story is a worthy source of that famous cover. The villain of the tale, a mad scientist named Kilgor, has convinced a dictator to fund his factory to create an army of seemingly indestructible giant red robots. Kilgor then double-crosses the dictator and directs his army of 5,000 giant robots to conquer the world. Samson is able to stop the robot army with the help of another scientist named Professor Brun (and it's worth noting here that the corporation that Victor Fox entered the comic book field with was called Bruns Publications).

The Fantastic Comics #4 "The Giant Robots of Kilgor" story has been tentatively credited to Will Eisner with artwork by Alex Blum. But it may be more likely that writer and Alex Blum's daughter Toni Blum wrote this story, and gave Lou Fine suggestions on the subject matter of the famous issue #3 cover. This was also likely not the only famous Lou Fine cover in which she played a role. Fine's legendary cover on Hit Comics #5 is based on a scene from the interior story by Blum and Charles Nicholas Wojtkoski in that issue. Blum is also credited as the writer of the debut Samson story in Fantastic Comics #1, and could thus be considered the character's co-creator.

An aspiring playwright who joined Eisner-Iger Studios along with her father around 1938, Blum was detail-oriented. According to her husband and Iger Studio artist William T. Bossert in later years, Blum worked with artists by providing an outline and then advising them on page breakdowns and points of emphasis, noting "She'd write an outline, and she'd help [the artist] break it down page-by-page. Then she would get the pages back, and she would pencil in the actual dialogue on the page. Then the lettering man would letter the dialogue. … She'd say, 'This is supposed to be on the fifth page and you have it on the second page. You're giving away the whole story in the beginning.' So she had to re-do the whole story as it went along."

Will Eisner would also later note that "Toni Blum was an in-house writer and wrote for George Tuska, Jack Kirby and Lou Fine. There were only two rooms and little in the way of secrecy. People in the studio could hear what was going on in the front office if they cared to listen."

This all seems to imply that Blum may have been giving Fine suggestions on cover imagery for her own stories. By way of contrast, Fine's early Green Mask covers for Mystery Men Comics appear to have little to do with artist Walter Frame's interior stories.

The Fantastic Comics series is full of important and well-crafted covers and material including the Samson feature itself and the likes of Fletcher Hanks' Stardust. There's a chance to get a copy of Fantastic Comics #4 (Fox, 1940) CGC VG/FN 5.0 Cream to off-white pages and other tough issues of the historically important Fantastic Comics series up for auction in the 2023 September 28 The Fox Comics Showcase Auction #40239 at Heritage Auctions.