Wednesday, September 03, 2008

Grapenut Flakes Post

Wednesday Advertising Day.

Last week I showed you some early fifties Blondie Sundays that were a lot more lively than the later years of that strip might have made you expect. This weekend, I showed a couple of pages of Harvey Kurtzman imitating that style. Here are two 1948 instalments of a 1948 ad that goes with it.

Fireball Twigg was a series of ads done in 1948 for Post's Grapenut Flakes, a well know cereal at the time. I believe they also sponsored some big radio show. The ads featured a couple very much like Blondie and Dagwood and were either done by Chick Young, making a bit of extra cash on the side or by someone imitating his style. When I showed a example from the same series, I figured it was the latter. I would even say it might be by Gill Fox, as I see some of his touches. Certainly the dog in the last panel isn't very much in Blondie's style and the vagrant in the first strip owes more to Jimmy Hatlo than to Chick Young. These are from May 1948 and both have a line saying 'to be continued', indicating this was a series. The one I showed a couple of weeks ago, was from Augustus, so the story might even have run for a couple of months.

May 5 1948:

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