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Lee Elias pencils, inks and signed; image size 11" x 15.5"; comes matted

Black Cat was an early comic book heroine that appeared in the pages of Harvey Comics from the early 40s to the early 50s, guesting in Pocket Comics, Speed Comics, and All-New Comics, Black Cat was rewarded with her own title in 1946. This book went through several permutations, from Black Cat to Black Cat Western Comics to Black Cat Mystery Comics to Mystery Western back to Western and finally settling on Black Cat Mystic, the fiery redhead was subject to the whims of an ever-shifting comic book landscape, even disappearing from her own title at points. This cover to Black Cat Mystery #30 by Lee Elias manages to combine some of the best elements of the title's strange journey into one bizarre piece of art.



Here we have Linda Turner aka Black Cat, backed up to the edge of a cliff by a menagerie of strange creatures, a fish with a human body and tentacles, a giant, angry bird, and what seems to be a praying mantis with a human head are all rapidly closing in on the titular hero, and Lee Elias' superior talents and fertile imagination make it all seem feasible. Fans of Golden Age curiosities are already lining up to bid on this unique piece of comic book history.


Artist Information

Lee Elias was a British-American comics artist. He was best known for his work on the Black Cat comic book published by Harvey Comics in the 1940s. Lee Elias left comic books after the 1954 publication of Fredric Wertham's anti-comics book Seduction of the Innocent, which used four of his Black Cat panels as examples of "depraved" comic art. In 1972, Elias came back to American comic books, working mainly on DC's various horror titles and secondary Marvel Comics titles including Power Man and The Human Fly. His last major project was The Rook series for Warren Publishing.