Eneg and 'Big Milly'

I'll just come right out and say I never got the attraction of Eneg's work. I think a big part of his claim to fame derives from simply being one of the few artists of his day producing any kind of catfight art at all. If he were doing this kind of material today, he'd be just another deviantART backbencher.

Eneg's work was always full of stocky, boozy-looking, crosseyed broads like you might find hunkered over the bar at some dive next door to the bus station.

'Big Milly' was sort of the archetype Eneg woman. If Stan Lee had decided to make Ben Grimm a woman, this is what she would have been like. It's easy to imagine Milly yelling 'it's clobberin' time!' before decking someone.

But as I got to looking today at this particular 'Big Milly' story, something else jumped out at me: not all the work here is Gene Bilbrew's. Parts of it – mostly faces – were done by someone else.

The wimpy Jm J Bullock-looking character appears to be entirely another artist's work.

And look at how Milly's face changes from page to page. Eneg was never able to draw faces from anything other than eye-level angles. It's extremely tough to do correctly, especially with line art where you don't have the advantage of shading to model the planes of the jaw and brow.

But Bilbrew's faces always looked like he drew a face on a bucket and turned it at different angles for reference. Milly's face on page 2 is a perfect example of that.

But then on page 3, Milly and her cousin take on a decidedly more palatable Stantonesque attractiveness in the top panel, before devolving back to Eneg-type roughness in the remaining two panels.

Maybe Eneg would have benefited from having another artist touch up his work all the time.