Wednesday Ad day.
Looking at the Johnstone & Cushing article from Hogan's Alley I was able to identify at least one of the realistic artists they employed. I knew that Creig Flessel (whose name I often mistype as Greg Fleissel) was a regular there. He was involved in Boy's Life comics section that Johnstone & Cushing produced from the very first issue, drawing many of it's one page stories and sometimes even the covers. I don't know if he was a very religious man, but he often got to do the stories from the bible, that were included for the young scouts education. In the Hogan's Alley article he mentions doing several series of ads, including one I am showing here. This series of ads for Eveready batteries ran for a long time. The samples I am showing are from 1954, 1958 and 1960. But I also remember seeing them in one page form in some comics from the late forties. I'll have to look out for those. The concept was quite simple. Readers were asked to provide their own stories about life threatening situations and how they were saved by Eveready batteries. I am sure some liberties were taken with these stories, because it went on far longer than one would have thought.
Here's one of his covers for Boy's Life in a totally different style.
Flessel also did covers for the Sunday magazine Pictorial Review, like Bud Blake after him.
Most of the stuff he did for Boy's Life were illustrated articles, but he also did two separate adaptations of Charles' Dickens' Christmas Carol. One in 1952 (which was reprinted a couple years later) and one in 1957. I took the color out of these, but I managed to retrieve three quarters of it in the first story. The 1960 Christmas page is more similar to the stuff he used to do for Boy's Life.
Last time I checked Greig Flessel was still alive and doing commissions. I will be showing some of those later, as well as some samples of his late fifties, early sixties newspaper strip David Crane (which he inherited from Superman artist Win Mortimer).
2 comments:
Hi Ger,
I'm a Belgian fan of comics, and on an other blog, I saw you name associated to Daan Jippes' name (Daan wrote you informed him about something...), so I guess you're in relation with him. I'd like to contact him. Could you help me ?
Reading your last post, I saw you propose to show some of Creig Flessels' commissions. I'm very fortunate to have two color drawings in my collection, sketches he did for me three years ago (Superboy and Sandman). If you want, I could provide you good scans; it would than be up-to you to decide whether you want to show it or not.
I hope you'll re-contact me. Thanks in advance. Best regards. Dominique Léonard (Belgium)
Domenique, welcome.
I can certainly forward any mail you have to Daan. And yes, I would love to have scans of your commisions, as ell as details about how and why you got them. I use 200 dpi scans for this blog, and save them 'for web use' at fifty procent. But my mail box can take a lot, so a larger scan is useful as well. Is there a way you can contact me or that I can contact you? I don't want to put my e-mail adress here... or we could arrange for me to mentio it here for an hour after which I remove it.
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