Micki St. James has today's question…
Just occurred to me so I thought I'd ask — has there ever been a good comic based on a Broadway show? There have been great comics based on movies of course (Sword in the Stone) and TV shows (Zorro) but I don't remember any My Fair Lady or Damn Yankees comic book.
I can think of Broadway shows based on comic books but no comic books based on Broadway shows unless you count these two…
In 1973, Charlton put out a comic book based on the movie of the Broadway show 1776. I wrote about it here. It was adapted by writer Joe Gill and drawn by Tony Tallarico.
Before that — in 1963 — Dell put out an adaptation of the movie based on the Broadway show The Music Man. As with the adaptation of 1776, it's rather odd to see the story told without the songs and it doesn't fare well. I don't know how anyone could fall in love with Professor Harold Hill if you didn't see him sing and dance…and what's The Music Man without a rousing performance of "The Shipoopi?"
Just who wrote the comic is unknown and for a long time, the identity of the artist was a maddening blank to those of us who obsess over such mysteries. Then a year or three ago, comic book scholar Martin O'Hearn figured it out and we all sighed, "Of course!" The rest of us can perhaps be forgiven because John Forte usually inked his own pencil art and here, someone else did the honors. We aren't sure who that "someone else" is.
John Forte (pronounced "fort") was a prolific comic book artist who "broke in" around 1945 working for, as so many beginners did then, the Iger shop. By 1950, he was working for almost every publisher in town but mainly for Quality Comics — on Blackhawk, among other features. When Quality shut down, he worked primarily for Atlas (aka Marvel) on just about all their non-funny funnybooks and then mainly for ACG. ACG was kind of a "farm team" for DC Comics and while working for them, he began getting jobs from DC, working for them until his death in 1966. He was then primarily drawing Jimmy Olsen for DC and when he passed, he was replaced by another ACG mainstay, Pete Costanza.
At DC, he inked a lot of stories penciled by Curt Swan and did well-remembered stints as penciler-inker of two features in particular. He was the artist on "Tales of the Bizarro World" in Adventure Comics and some have suggested he was the ideal artist to draw an imperfect version of Superman because he was an imperfect version of Curt Swan. When the Bizarros left Adventure Comics, their spot in the book was taken up by "Tales of the Legion of Super-Heroes" drawn by…John Forte. It was the first regular feature of The Legion and Mr. Forte designed a lot of the characters who formed that team. Reportedly, he struggled to draw those stories every month with their crowded panels but still somehow found time to draw the Music Man comic and a couple of others for Dell.
Someone else may come up with a comic book based on a Broadway show but…oh, wait! In 1971, there was a science-fiction play called Warp! from the Organic Theatre Company of Chicago. It was actually a trilogy and it ran there for a year before a brief, unsuccessful move to Broadway in 1973, closing after seven previews and eight performances. Ten years later, First Comics — which was based in Evanston, Illinois near Chicago — published a Warp! comic book based on the play. Does that count? Maybe someone else will come up with one that doesn't occur to me right now.
