1986: Three-D Three Stooges

Three-D Three Stooges (1986) #1-3 by … Norman Maurer? Et al?

I was not looking forward to reading this series at all. At the start of this blog series, it was fun reading the many, many 3D comics Eclipse published throughout the 80s, but the, er, novelty has worn off.

There are no credits in these comics, but “Norman Maurer” has signed most of the splash pages, so I guess this is yet another public domain comic that was published in the 50s? In 3D? Comics.org says my guess is correct.

Maurer is a pretty good artist, and these stories are not un-amusing.

But the artwork is so cluttered, and it looks like it’s been scanned from printed comics, so very few of these pages threedeeise a lot.

This backup non-Three Stoges strip works a lot better. That’s a relly nice panorama in 3D.

While there are no credits in the book, Eclipse does credit Moondog’s Comics for “supplying” some of the stories. I guess that means that they lent copies of the comics to Eclipse for reproduction.

One of the stories features the presumed creators, Norman Maurer… and Joe Kubert! Eclipse had just reprinted Kubert’s 3D comic, wo Maurer and Kubert were part of the same studio that hit upon the 3D gimmick for comics in the 50s? Makes sense.

But Eclipse seems to be scraping the bottom of the barrel here for nonsense to shovel into the marketplace.

On the other hand, IDW reprinted this stuff in 2011, so perhaps there are people who genuinely liked these comics.