Marcus Brazil:

Jack Gibson was one of Australia's funniest, most inventive and most underrated cartoonists. His comics and cartoons appeared regularly in the magazines Man and Man Junior, from about 1937. In 1938 he began his long-running series "Hell" for Man, depicting bizarre and intricately detailed scenes from the underworld full of social satire, ingenious methods of torture and bad puns. This was one of the most popular features of Man magazine, particularly with Australian servicemen during World War II.

This comic was the first of two (unnumbered) collections of the Hell cartoons. Neither collection includes a publication date, but there are a number of clues strongly suggesting this collection is from the mid 1940s. First is the art style, which includes the extensive use of ink wash, a technique which Gibson had abandoned by about 1946. Secondly is the subject matter - almost all of the cartoons in this collection include references to the war. The second Hell collection was published some years later - probably in the early 1950s.

This book contains 24 Hell cartoons - each of these is a double page spread apart from the last one, which is a single page. One of the unexpected surprises of this book is a 2 page Hell cartoon by Emile Mercier, "doing this for a sick friend". All the other cartoons as well as the cover and title page are by Jack Gibson. (I am aware of the existence of one other fill-in Hell cartoon, this time by Vernon Hayles, in the June 1944 issue of Man).