Thursday Story Day.
As usual I want to give you something to read on a thursday. Usually that means I am showing a mor realisticly drawn strip. But today we have one of those rare cartoon continuity strips. Buck O'Rue appeared I newspapers between Jan 15 1951 and somewhere in 1953. I first saw it, when Alan Holtz showen two weeks in september 2006. If you go to the Striper's Guide and look for Buck O'Rue, you'll find a publicity piece from Editors and Publishers as well. I agree with Alan that the writing on this stip ia the weak point, but the art is by Paul Murray, who was not the best Mickey Mouse artist ever, but if you grew up with the Disney comics as I did, he will be instantly recognizable as he was one of the most frequent ones. His work outside of Disney (his comic book work outside of Disney as well as his saucy cartoons) have been getting quite some attention on the web. So here are two more weeks of his one and only outing as a newspaper strip artist. The writer wasn't too bad either. He sold a lot of funny cartoons to all the magazines all through the fifties. But having a lot of funny names and satirical characters isn't the same as having good stories.
3 comments:
I love these drawings. I've always been curious, do you know what sizes the original art is in vs. what sizes they were reproduced at on the comics pages?
I don't know.. the only originals I have from that period are from comic books and they are easily two times up. But... a suprise visito to the blog sent me his copies of two original cartoon drawings by Paul Murray and I should at least be able to find out the size of those when I share them with you. What you could do, is go to the site of the Heritage auctions and look at the sizes of the originals for sale there. Two times up would be my guess, but it could even be larger. Then again, strips were reproduced larger then, as well. So two times up then could be a lot bigger than now. There is a great christmas card by Milton Caniff which hang in the Boca raton Strip Museum. I don't know what size the card was, but the original was huge, the size of a placemat.
This article by me features a photograph where Murry is holding several original Buck O'Rue dailies:
http://art-bin.com/art/murryeng.html
This is purely subjective, of course, but I'd say Murry's artwork was in a class by itself in the American Mickey Mouse comic books (not counting, of course, Floyd Gottfredson's newspaper work). When it comes to story, Buck O'Rue is something entirely different, but it's definitely a strip with a lot of heart in it and we're still aiming to publish the complete BOR in 2009. Due to Murry's artwork, the western setting and Dick Huemer's vivid imagination, I enjoy the strip very much.
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