The Fabuleous Fifties

After the Fox

Before Bumper to Bumper Gill Fox had another newspaper strip I don't know anything about. It was written by comedy writer and later actress Selma Diamond, who worked on the staff of Sid Ceasar's Your Show of Shows and was sen later in life in such series as Night Court. There is a Sunday reprinted and some information on Allan Holtz's excellent Stripper's Guide ().

In the late fifties he assisted Dik Browne on The Tracey Twins in the Boy Scout magazine Boy's Life. Or maybe he just took over the strip, when Browne got to busy with Hi and Lois. Someone at Wikipedia has stated that Fox assisted Browne on Ho and Lois as well, but I have my doubts. Maybe someone from the Browne family will see this and correct me.

After that he took over the Side Glances daily panel from William Galbraith Crawford. According to one source on the Internet he did that from 1962 to 1982. In a completely different style, of course.

One more oddity... Allan Holtz' mentions that Fox drew a one page strip for all eleven issues of Sponsored Comics, a comic book section that was done for a chain of supermarket shops in California. Again, Fox used a completely different style. Allan shows two pages here: at the start of his series on this rare commercial venture. Scroll all the way down for Fox and slowly work your way up through the posts for all the other surprises in those issues. Allan also mentions a short lived syndicated strip in 1959 called Wilbert, but I haven't been able to find any samples of it.

After Fox died in 2004, much of his original art turned up at Heritage Auctions. These consisted not only of the strips he continued from other artists or ghosted on, but of work by those other artists as well. This is how I got the original from one of The Tracey Twins pages, which I will show in a later post. There also was a huge amount of cartoons and strips he did for The Stars and Stripes in WW II. I have a couple of those cartoons and will scan them in as well.

But first... the rest of Bumper to Bumper.