Greasy Twins

Saturday Smooth Scalp Day. 

In the short history if newspaper comic strip ads (say, between 1935 and 1960) there were some companies that spent more money in this field then others. Big players were the cigarette companies, which used comics to advertise their various brands. The soap manufacterors were also very active, as were the producers of oilbased products. One of them was Vasiline, which came from Unilever. They made an oil based jelly that used to be best know for it's use as a hair gel. these days it is more often used as an neutral skin mostener and eh... other stuff. In the sampling I am sharing here, we see it used for hair gel in a 1944 ad drawn by Johnstone and Cushing regular Sargent. After the war, two new series were started by two of the Johnstone and Cushing mainstays. Rusty and Dusty was a long running adventure series drawn by Elmer Wexler. My samples run from the late fifties to at least 1956. In a mid fifties Johnstone and Cushing booklet he was specifically named as the artist behind this bi-weekly series. Soon after it became a hit, it was joined by another Vaseline ad, this time more funny, starrtinh to twin brats. This one tier addition looks like it was drawn or at least developed by Dik Browne and it is often mentioned as the strip that got him hired to do Hi & Lois. Still, pretty soon it seems to have been taken over by Bill Williams, in a similar but slightly different syle.  

 

Yellow Streak

Friday Yellowstone Day. 

Yesterday I shared a vouple of later Beetle Bailey Sunday I have cleaned over de last few weeks. As with Beetle I have mostly showed many of the early ones (and a couple more to go) and decided to started on the later side.

 

Grumpy Swampy

Thusday Camp Swampy Day. 

Over the years I have shared many many many Beetle Bailey Sundays and dalies. And even so, I have not scratched the surface. I certainly have plenty more to clean and add. Usually when I start cleaned a couple of my scans, I start with the oldest. Which is why I probably have more of those on this blog than anything else. Still, in the sprit of balance, for once I decided to start at the other end. The latest one I have were from the eighties. The style had simplified by then. And some of the more exstreme jokes seem to have been left out more often. But still, it holds up very well. 

 

Electricying Carmen

Saterday Pride Day.

Alfred Mazure (Maz) is one of Hollands proudest export products as far as comics go.  Already more than famous for his Dick Bos comic adventures, he moved to Britain after World War Two when the comcis climate became too oppresive for his pulpy work. He did two hard-boiled detective stories for the Daily Herald, Sam Stone and Bruce Hunter (both obvious clones of Dick Bos). The Eagle ran Mazure's comics course 'Jiu-Jitsu for Self-Defence' between 22 March 1951 and 1 June 1952. Later more famously, he drew the first stories for Peter O'Donnell's Romeo Brown before starting his own strip for The Daily Sketch, Carmen & Co. None of these are available on the British newspaper site I frequent. But two stories of Carmen & Co were reprinted in another paper two years later. Here are some samples.

By the way, did you know that he can also be considered 'the father of journalistic comics' with his travelogue With Three Tires Through the Jungle in the thirties?

 

The Best Defense

Monday Bonus clip.

Let me do a quick new post to make up for the fact that I repeated myself on the previous one. This is a small editorial bij Alfred Andriola. It has been said about Amdriola that he never did anything himself and had assistents for everything. And I can certainly see some of those assistants in some of his work. But he was a greaat president of the National Cartoonists Society together with Mel Casson in the late fifties and a formidable promotor of newspaper comics. As is shown in this piece from 1954.

 

With that I have another newspaper article that is more of the regular promotional stuff. From 1957.

Lahdida.

Monday Advertising Day.

I am selling a lot of Best of the Year cartoon books compiled by Lawrence Lariar. They were a staple in the forties and fifties. What makes the early ones so special is that they contained self written on paragraph bio's of all the cartoonists, usualy with a self portrait even. For Ebay I photographed them all (and I am saving them here). I have 1942 and 1944 so I am still looking for 1943. From 1946 the bio's disappear.

Ha! Not only did I redo a set of images I had already shared... I also chose the same title!

 Well, I'll just leave it up here.