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Harry Lucey




Title Creator Publisher Series Price
The Best of Harry Lucey, Volume One Jaime Hernandez, Harry Lucey IDW Publishing Archie $22.75
($24.99 list)
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Read more and comment... 		introduction by (the one and only) Jaime Hernandez    First off, we'd like to nominate this book as the single most overdue volume in the history of comics.  It may not win, but it will certainly be a contender.  If there is one single artist that comics readers need to increase their consciousness of, it's Harry Lucey.  Any comic book reader over forty is almost certainly already familiar with Lucey's work as he pencilled hundreds of stories for Archie Comics, including the majority of its flagship title for fifteen years.  So, anyone who read a few Archie Comics from before 1975 – or any of the ubiquitous Archie Digests that were seemingly everywhere through at least the 1980s – has read at least a few Harry Lucey stories – but there is no way they would have known it:  because LUCEY NEVER GOT ANY CREDIT – until, finally, now.  With all due respect to Bob Montana, Dan DeCarlo and all the other fine artists who worked for Archie Comics over the past seventy years, Harry Lucey was the best comics artist who ever worked for Archie and his work is their greatest legacy.  While this volume does not come close to presenting "The Best" of Lucey's work, the fact that it is subtitled "Volume One" fills us with hope that, when taken together with an ever expanding series of subsequent volumes, it will ultimately live up to it's title.
The Best of Archie Comics Harry Lucey, Dan DeCarlo, Frank Doyle, Bob Bolling and more ... Archie Comics $8.88
($9.99 list)
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Read more and comment... 		While this 400 page digest size volume most certainly does not live up to its title, it is the best anthology Archie Comics has managed to publish in as long as we can remember – and possibly ever, considering how poor their track record is in this particular department – and it is especially significant in that the publishers have finally recognized the bare minimum of their responsibility to the people who built their business and has in this book published artist and writer credits for all the stories.   Beginning in 1941 with the very first Archie story by Bob Montana and Vic Bloom from Pep Comics #22, The Best of Archie Comics continues on, decade by decade, through the subsequent seventy years, taking us all the way up to 2011.  For us here at Copacetic HQ, the glory days of Archie Comics will always be the 1950s through the early 1970s, when Harry Lucey and Dan DeCarlo ruled the roost, and, for a few years at least, Bob Bolling and Bill Woggon were given free reign on Little Archie and Katy Keene, respectively.  There is a generous selection of both Lucey and DeCarlo here, along with what is reputed to be Bolling's own personal favorite Little Archie tale, "The Long Walk," from Little Archie #20, and a modest sampling of Woggon's work, and so we won't hesitate to recommend this book to anyone who would like to be introduced to the world of Archie Comics.
Art In Time: Unknown Comic Book Adventures, 1940 - 1980 Sharon Rudahl, John Thompson, Willy Mendes, Pat Boyette and more ... Abrams ComicArts $35.00
($40.00 list)
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Read more and comment... 		<<•>>  edited by Dan Nadel <<•>> The long awaited follow up volume to Nadel's pioneering 2006 anthology of rarely seen and under appreciated comics, Art Out of Time, has at last arrived!  This time around we have a tighter focus.  While much of the work contained in Art of Time originally appeared in newspapers and broadsheets, all the work contained in this volume originally appeared in comic book form between 1942 and 1980.  Extending and expanding his mission to bring art world curatorial standards to comics, Nadel has provided an informative introduction to the book as a whole, along with separate one-page explanations of the underlying reasoning behind each of the thematically groupings into which the work is divided:  "Demand and Supply," "Where They Were Drawing From," "It's All In the Routine," and "Expansive Palettes."  The artists included here range from the golden age superhero work of H.G. Peter and Mort Meskin, through the post-WW II "atomic age" genre work of Bill Everett, Matt Fox, Jesse Marsh and Pete Morisi, and also including early work focused on hardboiled detective, Sam Hill, by the one and only Harry Lucey, who is best know for his 1960s work on Archie Comics.  Another artist whose work included here ranges far from their iconic work is John Stanley, who is best known for his multi-decade run Little Lulu.  Nadel has dug up a couple of obscure horror tales from 1962 that should be quite a surprise to most Stanley collectors.  Also from the 1960s we have Sam Glanzman's Kona and Pat Boyette's career high, the 25 page, "Children of Doom" from 1967. Heading into the underground era we have fairly obscure yet  nonetheless era-defining work from Willy Mendes and John Thompson.  And, finally, on the cusp of the undergrounds and the alternative revolution that supplanted them is Sharon Rudahl's 34 page epic, The Adventures of Crystal Night, is presented here in its entirety.  Essential, we say.
Archie Americana Series: Best of the Sixties, Book 2 Harry Lucey Archie Comics Archie $10.75
($11.95 list)
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Read more and comment... 		Please do your best to ignore the cover illustration -- which only proves how clueless the powers that be at Archie Comics are -- and instead focus on the name Harry Lucey.  The evidence of this volume indicates at least the possibility that the fact that they are sitting on a treasure trove of work by one of comics' true geniuses – namely, Harry Lucey – may finally be dawning on the people currently at the helm of Archie Comics; or it might be simply due to the fact they are in possession of such an embarrassment of riches that they simply stumbled onto such a large number of Lucey classics.  Whatever the case may be (and it may very well be the latter as Lucey STILL remains uncredited on all the work he produced for Archie; there's nary a mention of this comics great, even in this collection of which over half is devoted to his work -– Oh, the shame of it!  Even the monstrous Walt Disney Company eventually [after 40 years – but it's been longer than that for Lucey!] relented and allowed Carl Barks to be credited) this volume contains ten – count 'em! – solid Lucey classics from the 1960s.  Lucey is one of the original comic book artist "lifers" -- those who started their career in the original "Golden Age" of comic books in the 1940s and then dedicated their entire professional lives to creating comics.  The arc of his early career was fairly typical and resembled that of many of his peers:  beginning with heroic fantasy before moving on to crime and romance comics along with the trends of the day; but then he discovered his true calling with Archie.  Starting in the late 1950s and running through to the mid-1970s, Lucey contributed between one and four stories to nearly every issue of the flagship title, Archie Comics, along with plenty of contributions to other titles, and who knows how many classic covers, producing during this 15-year run one of the most engaging and entertaining bodies of work in the history of comics.  In the process Lucey developed a strong, and singular personal style that has won adherents among some of today's most important comics creators -- most notably Jaime Hernandez, who is one of the very few who makes a point of singling out Lucey for praise -- as well as animators.  He originated a vocabulary of body language that stands alone.  And throw away any preconceptions you may have about Archie Comics being uniform in their blandness.  While it is certainly true that much of their output is trivial and boring, and the characters have been embarrassingly compromised on more than one occasion by the publishers' various relationships with the evangelical Christian community, Archie Comics remains one of the most important publishers in the history of comic books and Harry Lucey's work is their greatest legacy... if only they would wake up to this fact (good God, what will it take?)!  Lucey continually experimented with the form, and -- crucially -- he had years of experience under his belt, during which time he not only gained a fully developed set of both story-telling and rendering skills, but from which he came into the possession of a thorough and strong grasp of the medium as a whole.  As a result his experiments continually bore fruit, resulting in the creation of many unique works – the majority created with his primary collaborator, script-master Frank Doyle.  Most notable in this regard is his employment of "direct address."  There are quite a few classic Lucey tales in which Archie, Jughead, Betty and/or Veronica directly address the reader and engage them in a deconstruction of the narrative as -- or sometimes before -- it transpires.  He was also the master of pantomime comics, as this classic posted at The Copacetic Gallery attests.  Anyway... to get to the point:  while this volume we're hawking to you here barely scratches the surface of the work of Harry Lucey and contains none of his very best work, it still makes for the best single volume of Archie Comics currently available and is eminently worth the while of anyone who enjoys comics as well as anyone who wants to learn how to add a little magic to their own comics making efforts.  While we're not 100% certain of this fact -- as duties were often shared at Archie Comics and Lucey may only have a hand in some of these as opposed to being the sole artist (for example, we're pretty sure someone else worked on the last story in the book, "The Line," but it still has enough trademarked Lucey-isms to make us believe he was involved) -- we believe that all the stories in the book are by Lucey (if not soley, then at least in some capacity), except those on pages 12 - 41.  So, dig in!