The Fabuleous Fifties

Hardly Boys

Wednesday Ad Day.

Last week I showed a couple of realisticly drawn advertising strips by artists I couldn't identify. Today I have four more from a series that seems to have been done by one artist, or at least in one style. I think I have seen the earliest Rusty and Dusty installments in some of those adverstisement heavy DC comic books that often also ran a similar Sam Spade ad page. These are from just after the war and my collection of newspaper sections doen't go back that much, so I have never come across any Sunday ads for Rusty and Dusty that have been adapted to a comic book format, but I guess that's how it went. They were produced for Sunday sections and used for comic books as well. Anyway, the artist for this series is unknown to me, although I feel it is not one of the regulars of these ads. I mean, it doesn't look like the work of Lou Fine or Greig Flessel or Lee Elias or Carl Wexler or any of the artist I know were doing realistic comic ads in that period. It doesn't remind me of any of the artists I know from that period. Most comic book artists didn't reach the level of these ads, either because they were beinners or because they didn't have the time to spend. but still, it could have been any of the competent artists that were around then.

Rusty and Dusty was an exciting detective strip and deserves more attention than it has been getting. The series ran until well into the fifties, so depending on the starting date, it probably ran for more than ten years. as did many of these series in those years. The samples I am showing are from 1954, '55 and '56.

As you can see from the second and forth sample, these ads were often paired with a one tier strip about The Trouble Twins. This is the series that got Dik Tracey the Hi and Lois assignment together with The Tracey Twins in Boy's Life.