Pitt, Stanley
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1925-2002) Australian Comics artist, cartoonist and illustrator, active from around 1942, his early comics work in particular influenced by Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon; over an exceedingly prolific career he sometimes signed his name Stan Pitt, and sometimes worked as by Safone Jais. His first original work of sf interest is probably the comic strip Silver Starr in the Flameworld (24 November 1946-November 1948 Sunday Sun [and elsewhere]), in which Silver Starr flies a rocketship into the Hollow Earth kingdom of Flameworld and rescues a princess. Other comics of visual interest, though they were anything but innovate as stories, including work on Captain Atom in collaboration with Arthur Mather between 1949 and 1954, and intermittently on the Superhero strip Captain Power (beginning 6 March 1949 The Sun-Herald).
Pitt's early facility, and his adroit use of perspective to convey a sensations somewhere between the Sense of Wonder and vertigo, are perhaps most readily appreciated in his work for Malian Press's Famous American Science Fiction series of sf booklets reprinting sf by American authors including Poul Anderson, Nelson S Bond, John W Campbell Jr, Robert A Heinlein, Henry Kuttner, Murray Leinster, C L Moore and others. Leinster's The Unknown (August 1949 Thrilling Wonder as "Fury from Lilliput"; 1952 chap) and Moore's There Shall Be Darkness (February 1942 Astounding; 1954 chap) perhaps stand out, but none of Pitt's renderings are unremarkable. At around this time, in collaboration with his brother Reginald, Pitt drew Gully Foyle a comics version of Alfred Bester's The Stars my Destination (1956), only released many years later in Graphic Novel form as Gully Foyle (graph 2001). [JC]
Stanley John Joseph Pitt
born Rozelle, Sydney, New South Wales: 2 March 1925
died New South Wales: 2 April 2002
works (highly selected)
- Gully Foyle (Australia: no publisher given, 2001) [graphic novel: written by Benjamin Pitt: illus/pb/Stanley Pitt]
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