Thurday story strip day.
Before Mary Perkins went On Stage there were several strips that tried to capture the magic of the succesful movie and play Stage Door by creating a strip about a girl or several girls living together or on their own trying to make it in Hollywood or New York. Most of them failed, which caused Leonard Starr a bit of a headache when he sold it. One of those strips was Jeanie by Gil Fox and Selma Diamond, which I have been showing here over the last few months. Another was It's Me, Dilly written by Mel Casson. I have showed one and will show more sometime in the future. But here is another one, called Dawn O'Day. Dawn O'Day was drawn by Val Heinz, a pretty obscure artist. All that isn known about him is that he drew this strip from 1949 onwards and that he worked as an assistant to Bill Perry on Gasoline Alley from 1945 to 1949. The Gasoline Alley fom that period is very different stylisticly from this strip, so that offers us no clues to Heinz' style or further career. The last Dwan O'Day' I have are from 1954, but what he did after that is a mystery to me. Judging from the style on this strip, he may very well have gone on to be an assistant to Alfred Andriola on Kerry Drake. Andriola was also the artist on It's Me, Dilly by the way using the pseudonymn Alfred James. Dawn O'Day was daily and sunday from the Chicago News Syndicate and appeared in the Chicago News and the Baltimore Sun for the samples I have found.
From July 16, 1950:
Jan 25, 1953:
Feb 22, 1953:
April 19, 1953:
May 17, 1953:
June 7 1953:
3 comments:
Brilliant! Thanks! I enjoy these Caniff style artists!
Dan
The Comic Journal, linking to this post, says Mel Casson was somehow involved. Maybe they are misreading my comments or my flippent remark about Heinz working as an assistent to Andriola was more tru than I thought. Andriola and Casson did not only work togetehr on It's Me Dilly, but they were running the NCS together in the fifties and produced a very funny pocket full of cartoons. If ou wan tto see some of it, you should try the link to Mike Lynch's blog. He spotlighted parts of it a ouple of months ago.
I have never seen this strip before. This "Val Heinz" guy fascinates me. I swear a lot of the work resembles William Overgard's style at the time. However Overgard didn't draw stiff figures (strip 1, panel 1), and as he was a car nut every car he drew was real, not a generic car like the one that appears in the background.
This artist's work also has echoes of George Wunder's "Terry and the Pirates" in the late 40s; might he have pencilled for GW? I notice the letterer is the same one Wunder used...
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