Reaction to our most recent Blogpost - 25, displaying Murphy Anderson’s best PS Continuity was so enthusiastic that we feel compelled to follow it with Murphy’s runner-up PS Continuity, as selected by the New Millennium PS Staff. He created “Tools Paradise” for PS 261, which appeared in August of 1974 during the first year that Murphy held the PS contract on his own.
After Will Eisner tongue-lashed me into finally starting on my book, Will Eisner and PS Magazine, I undertook to interview all living PS editors and as many of the long-term key artists as I could contact. Among the latter, the one with Murphy really seemed to be a breeze.
That’s because he and I were born in the same year—1926. For Murphy, it was in July. My birthday is in November. That means Murphy turned 85 last month, and I have three months to go. My colleague in this blog effort, Joe Kubert, also was born in 1926—in September.
Then, too, there is a shared Appalachian heritage. I came out of southern West Virginia and Murphy is a product of far western North Carolina, beyond Asheville.
In addition to discussing PS and his long career in comics, we chatted about family names in his Mars Hill area, tobacco allotments, relative aspects of horses versus mules as farm draft animals, and a Secret Service agent from his neighborhood whom I had met in Washington.
The funniest part of the exchange was his narrative of a youthful expedition by bicycle from Greensboro to Mars Hill—a distance of 191 miles with a concurrent altitude-gain of 1,457 feet—described with a courtly delivery sprinkled with chuckles.
—p.e.f.
UPCOMING POSTINGS:
¶ Early Covers Put Eisner, PS in Hot Water
¶ Best of Zeke Zekely in PS
¶ A Covey of Connies: World War II to Today
¶ Best PS Continuity by Backes Group
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