Secret Agent X-9

The Look of Love: The Rise and Fall of the Photo-Realistic Newspaper Strip, 1946-1970

This early 1968 sequence, which ran from Feb 19 to May 4 (final panel below right) marks the true beginning of Goodwin and Williamson's mark on the title. All their characteristic storytelling, for both plot and art, emerge here. It is reprinted in Collector's Showcase No. 10 (or Secret Agent Corrigan Book 2). The portrait of "Debbie" below has proven to be so popular and generic with bloggers and discussion lists in the past, I've had to resort to unlinking a larger size image and defacing the smaller image with a site logo to discourage hotlinking. Enjoy the restored image unblemished while you can.

Archie Goodwin and Williamson's first year on X-9 in 1967, while on the surface comparable in quality with the best of other photo-strips of the time (for me, Modesty, Rip, Juliet Jones, and On Stage), is still apprentice work. The pair had yet to find their own voice, their own vision. That comes with 1968.

The early stories are ruler-straight narratives. A single panel tease as one story ends, a day or two exposition introducing the new antagonists, with Corrigan learning his role on the case, then the chase begins. Usually only a single clue leads Corrigan to the hideout, he strikes, and a perfunctory battle sequence follows, ending the storyline with the arrest of the criminals. Goodwin, a friend of Williamson since the mid 50s, had enjoyed a short stint helping script On Stage in the early 60s (and collaborating with Williamson on the Flash Gordon #1) and had not yet written the extended stories required of adventure strips. He said later in interviews that he was searching to find the same exotic sense of adventure that James Bond films of the time contained.

Likewise, Williamson's initial strip experience was short, at this point consisting of his three year assistantship with the late John Prentice on Rip Kirby and short piecework helping John Cullen Murphy on Big Ben Bolt and Dan Flagg. Williamson has always mentioned how much he learned from Prentice, even though by this time Williamson had been a grizzled comic book vet for 10 years. Prentice taught him how to be a thorough professional, how to deal with hard deadlines, and the accuracy demands of a strip which required extensive reference files. He taught Williamson how to do men dressed in business suits with sharp creases, to spot watery blacks on automobiles so that paint lacquer gleams differently than chrome and from what angle to picture the car.

Williamson's heroic figure work had always been among the best in the industry. Even from the start as an assistant, Williamson gave Rip Kirby an athletic grace. After working with Prentice, he knew how to put his figures in the idealized real world expected of photo strips. Williamson shows that from the first solo story. But there was something missing for him, that spur he needed to achieve new heights, and with this, his sixth story, he found what it was.

When Williamson began, he left no background un-rendered, as in the first two panels. Yet note in the third panel how the bottom portion of the two assassins isn't even suggested. That's the artist as handy model, the swarthy killer with the knife.

Williamson's old EC buddy Wally Wood once said he inked a page by first filling in the parts that needed black, then moving to the parts that didn't. Williamson would do Wood proud here, using the same dramatic black approach for the beginning of a thrilling night sequence that became a Corrigan staple. (Modesty Blaise by Jim Holdaway used a similar plan of attack to provide punctuation for a story.) The daily immediately above comes at a mini-break, the pause between Saturday to Monday. Note that the two strips below are consecutive days, mid-week.

First off, Goodwin provided him with stories with many more narrative beats--Corrigan now had to contend with short, sharp episodes of rising action and danger, little

betrayals, false clues, mixed motivation, weekday cliffhangers, stretches of no dialogue, and Saturday-Monday suspense breaks. These had been missing from the continuity before. Goodwin was simply more efficient in telling the story, and more attuned as to how to tell it. There was more happening, even though the length of the tale (12 weeks) had remained the same.

Before it seemed as if Williamson had simply laid out the story as in a comic book page, with each day just picking up where the previous day had left off. With this story, Williamson instead tackled the 3-panel format as a daily puzzle. What would be the best way to tell the story on this particular day? And for answers, he unconsciously returned to his love of movie serials and classic B-features, the same source material that had once animated Noel Sickels and Milton Caniff. Ask Williamson about his layouts and he shrugs, his storytelling sense so deeply ingrained in him from childhood. Luckily, the canvas of a daily was still big enough to contain such stories. Note in the picture above how large Williamson worked. In 1973, he still laid out Corrigan, at 5 3/4 X 19 3/4, slightly larger than Raymond had done in his final period on Rip. (Williamson's successor, the sadly departed George Evans, would be forced to produce the strip at 2/3 of that size!)

Here Williamson's art contained less background and full figures, with repetition of key poses, especially faces, familiar close-ups so the reader could recognize the characters of a crowded cast immediately. The panel arrangement became more fluid, with different sizes, emphasis, small insets, panoramas. Williamson wasn't afraid of tiny figures, a boldness that meant he could get an epic scale to his dailies that most photo strips had long since abandoned. (Most photo-artists cheated here, as Drake would do, with only the dialogue inserted in the middle of paste-up panel.) In each story there would be a Corrigan set piece, a dark, dense, action sequence set at night where Williamson would get to display chiaroscuro pen and brush virtuosity, giving his work a "liquid sheen" like no other.

What remained from the photo-strip tradition begun by Raymond and Drake was the selective use of photos for distinctive faces, figures, and backgrounds, but the "big head" Cooper Studios manner, for the most part, was now defunct, although there were instances when it could be used. When strips became bland "head and shoulders" productions in the late 70s, it was due to the Big Squeeze, the reduction of column inches newspapers allotted to strips they carried, not the remnants of the Cooper Studio style.

Williamson had returned the adventure strip to the grand traditions of Coll, Foster and Raymond Flash, of Terry and the Pirates, but with a modern twist.

Williamson used whatever he needed to tell the story, models, photos, his own face in a mirror, and pure invention. The meld isn't always a smooth one. Corrigan, despite being the strip's hero, never had a consistent likeness, with his look changing even from day to day, let alone from story to story. Different characters yet undistinguishable from one another, especially comely females, are always a problem for any realistic artist, even with the differing hairstyles usually employed. It's easy to see when Williamson used photos for the supporting cast as their likeness has an authority it's almost impossible to duplicate otherwise. The next sequence (shown here with the group of small portraits) beginning in early May and ending at the end of July shows this Hobson's choice. The character Debbie, whoever she may have been in real life, is clearly taken from a set of photographs. (I've been told all the females are variations of Williamson's wife Cori.) Note how distinctive and individualized she is, while her crime boss boyfriend looks over-rendered and a obvious comic strip construction. In Williamson's defense, the work was not meant to be examined this way--whole stories, whole years at a gulp.