Roads Not Taken: Edmond E. Good’s “Knight Masters”

Canadian illustrator, writer and co-author of more than a dozen comics Edmond Elbridge Good (1st July 1910 – 22nd September 1991) created the Rex Baxter feature for Bell Publishing in 1942 and drew the Scorchy Smith strip (taking over from Frank Robbins in 1944) and Tarzan for United Feature Syndicate.

Tarzan (1947) - art by Edmond E. Good

He also helped to introduce DC Comics’ Tomahawk, a character who debuted in Star Spangled Comics #69 in 1947.

The first appearance of DC Comics character Tomahawk, in Star Spangled Comics #69. Art by Edmond E. Good

The first appearance of DC Comics character Tomahawk, in Star Spangled Comics #69. Art by Edmond E. Good

In the mid 1950s, like other comic creators, he established his own publishing company, Good Comics Inc. – and put out four issues of Johnny Law, Sky RangerAdventures, which he also wrote and drew.

Edmond E. Good’s Sky Ranger Adventures (1950s)

Edmond E. Good’s Sky Ranger Adventures (1950s)

Good clearly envisioned bigger things than simply working as a jobbing artist, as this promising (but undated) set of tryout strips suggests.

Knight Masters is a detective specializing in supernatural cases – in this case, a Voodoo menace – in the tradition of Seabury Quinn’s Jules De Grandin stories or William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki the Ghost-Finder.

Edmond E. Good’s Knight Masters (Date Unknown)

Edmond E. Good’s Knight Masters (Date Unknown)

The pitch failed, but these examples endure as impressive monuments to a series that might have been. The art sold for close to $1000 earlier this year in Heritage Auctions.

(An eighth piece is a fragmentary strip, drawn in pencil).

Unfortunately, there’s no details of when Good created this pitch. Was it while he was working on Scorchy Smith and Tarzan in the 1940s, or later, when he was self publishing? The contemporary stereotyping aside, it’s an intriguing item of lost comic projects and an interesting WebFind.

Good moved away from comics in the 1950s into commercial illustration and radio script writing (and television, too, working for clients that included the BBC.(I’ve been unable to immediately find any specific credits for his BBC work, although he seems to have worked in TV as “Edmund E. Good”).

He settled in Orlando in the late 1950s, where he worked for Tupperware as Artistic Director, a position which he held until his retirement in 1974.

There’s a profile of Edmond Good here on Comic Book Daily

With thanks to Ernesto Guevara for finding this on Heritage Auctions



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