Sunday Leftover Day.
Earlier this week I showed some advertising work by Greig Flessel. Flessel had a long career in comics and is still doing commissions. Belgian fan Dominique sent me two of the recent commissions Flessel did for him. I hope he wil add some comments about how he got them in the comments section.
Flessel is 93 years old and still doing commissions... here are a couple more, I have borrowed from the Comic Art Galery. I love the fact that his ink line is still as lively as it is. That is often the first thing to go with elderly artists but Flessel still has everything it takes.
As I said earlier, Greig Flessel was one of the contributors to the Boy's Life comcis section that was produced by Johnstone and Cushing. In fact, Fleissel was involveld from the first issue in september 1952. Boy's Life had been around for a couple of years by then and it had always had comic pages, but in 1952 they decided to introduce a color comic section. Since Boy's Life had the same size as the Saturday Evening Post, this resulted in a tabloid sized section, with funny strips, adventure strips, illustrated true stories and illustrated boy scout tips. In the first issue Flessel contributed an illustrated bible story.
In the fourth issue he did the Dickens stoy I showed earlier this week and in the second issue there is another bible page, illustrating the story of David and Goliath that I would have assumed was Flessel, if I didn't see while scanning that it was signed in a way that looks a lot like Irv Novick's signature. Novick was another frequent contributor, although I had always assumed he staretd later in the fifties. He signe dmost of his stories with his destinctive signature... an I and an N melted together with the right hand leg of the N continuing into a circle around the whole thing. The siganture on the David and Golaith story has the same circular thing. But... when I enlarged it, I couldn't find the I and N... and had I not seen a similar signature recently? Then it came to me... this was a slightly cut off version of Greig Flessel's signature, as can be seen in the Earthquake Eveready story I showed last wednesday.
Finally, here's another illustration he did in 1960. I hope to be showing more of Flessel's work in the future.
7 comments:
Hi all,
as Ger invited me to post a comment, I'm doing it right now. I'm a long time fan of comics, and I remembered very well the stories of Superboy and Sandman that I read when I was a young boy. A few years later, I discovered the man behind the pages: Creig Flessel.
I had some good acquaintances in the field of comics, and so I succeded in getting into contact with Creig. I explained my interest for his work and for these two superheroes, and a few weeks later, I've had the very good surprise to find these two wonderful sketches in my postbox. A great gift from a great artist. To be honest, I'm not sure Creig is still doing commissions, he's 96 now. Best. Dominique
For those of you who had any doubt about the fact if I am dislectic... I have been writing Creig as Greig all this time, without evne seeing the difference. Now I have to go back and change them all.
Moninique thanks for the explenation. Mr. Flessel is even older than I thought, which makes his most recent art (from 2006) even more remarkable. He has given his fans many years of pleasure and I wish him a few more restful years of his own.
At a later time I will show some more of his work in Boy's Life and his early sixties continuation of the very religious David Crane.
Thanks for this. I'm fortunate enough to be in contact with Creig from time to time. Creig used to run the NCS Long Island chapter, the "Berndt Toast Gang" prior to my coming along and running the BTG for five years. He is a gentleman and does a lot of watercolors and posters for some of the local events at the senior center where he lives in CA.
One of his great supporters is Jean Schulz, who had a Flessel day at the Schulz Museum last year.
I just read that Mr. Flessel died during my holiday on juky the 18th at the age of 96. Another great link to the past has left us. He had a great career and I will come back to it at some later point.
I've started to clean up and re-post TALES FROM THE BIBLE at my blog, intent on repeating what I did last year with SPACE CONQUERORS!
Several people have confirmed that Creig Flessel was the artist on THE BIBLE series, although I find it odd that his name does not appear on ALL the installments, just most of them.
By accident, last night I also ran across the Wikipedia page for Bob LeRose, who apparently colored ALL the color comics in J&C's BOYS' LIFE comics section.
Oh, here's the link...
http://professorhswaybackmachine.blogspot.com/2013/02/tales-from-bible-1952.html
Irving Novick took over TALES FROM THE BIBLE in either April or May 1956. I wish these guys would make sure their signatures were on every installment! But then, the only namne on SPACE CONQUERORS! for its entire run was Al Stenzel, who wrote it (and, possibly, drew the earliest episodes).
http://professorhswaybackmachine.blogspot.com/2013/03/tales-from-bible-1956.html
In 1957, the format changed from comic-strip to "illustrated story book". While the art is gorgeous, I kinda prefer more panels instead of massive blocks of text.
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