Posted in: Comics, Heritage Sponsored, Vintage Paper | Tagged: golden age, MLJ, shield, Shield-Wizard Comics, wizard

The Superheroic Horror of Shield-Wizard Comics #11, Up for Auction

Published Sat, 21 May 2022 21:32:11 -0500

Shield-Wizard Comics #11 is a stand-out horror cover of this unique MLJ Magazines series. Though a little-known name in comics history, cover artist Clem Weisbecker (sometimes known simply as "Clem") worked in comics from about 1941 to 1943 for publishers including MLJ Magazines, Marvel/Timely, and Fawcett Publications. He often combined superheroics or adventure with horror to great effect, such as in the Captain America Comics #50 story "The Walking Dead" or the Whiz Comics #45 Lance O'Casey story "Canibal Isle." There's an interesting example of this underappreciated artist's work as penciler/inker on the cover and inker on the interior Shield stories in Shield-Wizard Comics #11 (MLJ, 1943) Condition: VG+ up for auction in the 2022 May 22-23 Sunday & Monday Comic Books Select Auction #122221 at Heritage Auctions.

Shield-Wizard Comics is a bit of an unusual series in the context of any era of comic book history. Typically, a star character of an anthology title might be spun out into his own series. But in this case, The Shield and the Wizard were separately both the stars of the Pep Comics series in the early going, and Shield-Wizard Comics spun both of them out into a separate series that contained two stories each for both characters, while they continued to have stories in Pep Comics. Notably, the Hangman displaced the Wizard as the defacto co-star of Pep Comics a short time after Shield-Wizard Comics was launched.

But the ability of artists like Clem Weisbecker, Charles Biro, Harry Sahle and others at MLJ who were able to effectively blend superheroics and horror, particularly on their covers, is one of the things that made the publisher's line memorable. There's a great example of that in Shield-Wizard Comics #11 (MLJ, 1943) Condition: VG+ up for auction in the 2022 May 22-23 Sunday & Monday Comic Books Select Auction #122221 at Heritage Auctions.