Friday Comic Book Day.
Good news! Through several Yahoo groups the news has reached me that a complete edition of Jerry Robinson's Jet Scott is in the works. They are still looking for some of the dailies, which means they intend to make it a collection worth having. Fot those of you who would like to see a sample click on the Jet Scott link to the right.
And now to Ray Bailey. Ray Bailey is often confused with Bernard Baily. Apart from the missing 'e', their artwork it pretty different, especially in the early years. But their names are so similar that some mistakes have been made (including by me, when I mentioned that The Horrors of it All had a Ray Bailey story yesterday). One of the reasons I was confused, is the fact that Heritage Auctions offered an original Ray Bailey page for the title page of an issue of Harvey's Alarming Adventures a couple of years ago. I had almost bid on that page of original art, because they first had it up as possibly by Mort Meskin. When they found out their mistake, they let me keep my money and it was sold as a Ray Bailey page at a later auction. They also have a couple of other original art pieces by the same artist, including a complete story for Alarming Adventures #1. For a long time I have thought that artist to be Ray Bailey in a later stage of his development. But in researching this piece I found that it could very well be the work of someone else. Based on that art style, I started scanning a story from DC's Gang Busters #63, when I found on the GCD that it was attributed to Bernard Baily. The GCD has had it's own problems with attrubutions, but these were in part done by Arthur Lorty, who usually is quite accurate. I looked around a bit further to see that the title page shown above was actually attributed to both Baily and Bailey. It also turned out I had some real Ray Bailey scans on my computer, from his work on the Boris Karloff title in 1963. According to the GCD Bailey has started working for Dell through Milton Caniff, doing most of the drawing and inking the Four Color Steve Canyon comics (apart from the face of the titular hero, which were done by Caniff himself along with the writing). These attributions were by Alfredo B. (his full name escapes me for now), who really seems to know his stuff. Looking at the story represented below, you can see the similarities with Bailey's Space Cadett dailies from yesterday. You'll also see the rounded scheekbones that Milt Caniff favored at that time.
Alarming Adventures #1, title page:
Alarming Adventures #1, story:
Gang Busters #63:
Boris Karlodd Tales Of Mystery #6, first story:
4 comments:
Interesting, I see the similarities and the differecnes now. But I still don't understand why someone named Ray would sign their name Bernard.
Does he do that on any of the pages here? The main difference seems to be in the inking. Still, I think Bernard had the biggest jump in style, which you'll see if I show some of his early forties (or even late thirties) newspaper strip work on Gilda Gay.
For Ken, if you are still looking for Bernard Bailey's Cracked style, there is a four page story from Cracked #114 in the Heritage archives. The style he uses is as sharp as the one here.
And I am not even mentioning Matt Bailey!
Uh, that name is Karloff, not Karlodd.
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