Saturday Overload
I will be leaving you on your own the next week, as I am having a well deserved (well, that's what I say) holiday in the UK and I have not yet found the trick to publishing here in advance. There shoudl be some buttons for it, but they elude me.
So now that all te preperations for the holday are doing and the house is inorde, I am tking the time to show you a lot of leftover goodies. I have started so many new strigs the last few weeks, that there doesn't seem to be enough room to continue everything, but let me take this opportunity to tell you about the state of things here and my intentions for the next few months.
One of the things I have to do, is find a way to reinstate the spelling checker on this blog I used to be able to do that, but the button now doesn't work anymore. So occasionally one of my many typo's may slip by uncorrected.
I am a sucker for attention, so an series of posts that get a lot of traffic get continued. The rest will depend on my personal taste (I continued the Milt Caniff serial even though it was apparently not looked forward to by anyone, just because I thought it proved a point). Hank Ketcham always does well, so I will try and upload new cartoons and ads by him as soon as I scan them. I have stacks of Tue's and Saturday Eveing Posts next to my computer, so there is still a lot to come. I am ending this post with a couple more beauties.
I will continue the first few months of Ray Bailey's Tom Corbett. I like to be able to read a whole story on this sort of strips and wll probably continue until there is a good stop in the storylie. If he learned well from Milt Caniff there will be none and the stip will go from one story into the other organicly.
I will also show more of Mort Meskin's Tom Corbett. I haven't got issue #2 of his three issue Prize run on that strip, so if anyone wants to trade or offer scans, lease get in contact. I will also try and show more of Meskin's other work, but most of it I will have to scan on my own. A good representation of his work would include at least one of his romance stories and a couple of the later covers of Young Brides, some of his work with and without George Roussos for Timely/Atlas (I have a great RM signed collaboration ready) and some of his earliest work for DC (which I can't seem to fins in the mountain of scanned DC books I have), which was criticized so much by his dc editors.
I lso want to show more of B.C. I have a large number of dailies and black and white scans from Newspaperarchive.com, but I have set myself the task to at least include some fresh (color) scans with every post, so it'll be bit by bit. I'll keep concentrating on the early years, of course.
Same goes for P.T. Bimbo (scan down for it if you haven't seen that yet), The Wizard of Id (even tough I will have to resort to more black and white micro-fiche material for that one to cover the early years), the Flintstones and Yogi Bear (which I don't like as much as The Flintstones, but it was made by the same creative team (but maybe not from the start, see the next post).
I'll also try to cover more of the Ketcham imitators o the late fifties. I have a lot more of Gill Fox' Ketcham-influenced Wilbert, Mel Casson's Angel and several others. I am trying to get more Casson cartoons scanned, so I can do an overview of Casson's whole career which also includes a realistic strip in the forties and his association with Alfred Andriola, which included but did't end with It's Me Dilly. Dilly is another of those strips I have plentyful in black and white, but I also have a lot of sunday papers with that strip so I am waiting to scan those.
Another area I am interested in, but haven't even started on here is newspaper strips drawn by comic book artists. The common story is that every comic book artist wanted to be a newspaper artist so they wouldn't be loked down upon anymore. Turns out many comic book artists did have a newspaper strip for a short while, most of wich were discontinued and/or forgotten. Most kept on drawing comics at the same time, probably for economic reasons. This to me signals that they did not want to be newspaper artists because of the honor, but because it offered a chance at richness. When it didn't it was often aborted. Small difference, but telling to me. Among the artists I have found strips by are Irv Novick, Lou Cameron, Al Weiss, Ogden Whitney, Carl Hubbell and Paul Reinman. These are not earthshocking finds, as most of them are mentioned in Jerry Bails ecellent Who's Who project, but find it weird that comic book histerians have taken the word of newspaper strip historians that these are all worthless projects. Some of the ran over three years and that may not be a lot in newspaper terms, but it means the artist was really putting all his effort in it for a certain period. So what may not seem interesting fom a newspaper strip history perspective, but in the light of an artists career it can be very important. Along the same lines, I would like to show more of Bud Blake's daily panel, which he did for eleven years before finding fame with Tiger. Some goes for Mel Lazerus, who's Miss Peach was such a succes that it completely obliterated the fact that he did a small kid's panel years before that. Or the fact that most historians reduce Stan Lee and Dan DeCarlo's run of Willy Lumpkin from 15 months to 'almost a year' just before they think 'it was just no good'. along the same lines I am still looking for more of Bob Powell's Teena-a-go-go as I have so many that I would love to show it completely and Howard Nostrand's Bat Masterson (at times ghosted by Powell and Bernie Krigstein).
I have started showing some rare Milt Gross material I have a couple of cartoony things from Ken left, but haven't come around to scanning them. I also have a double of one of his review pieces, which I should at to my to sale list along with loads of other stuff.
Major scan projects are the comlete run of 'Duke' Handy, whih I keep putting off, the equally impresive Sgt. Bilko series of sigarette ads whic I haven't even started doing yet, more of the quiet absurdity of Hanan's Louie, complete storylines of Bob Lubber' Long Sam (if any series is due for a reprint series), Pogo's impressive 1966 Pre-Hysterical storyline, more of Hi and Lois and seventies projects such as Boner's Ark, Howard Post's The Dropouts, the Laugh-In Sunday series and Hank Ketham's Half-Hitch.
I also have a good run of Lee Elias' Beyond Mars which wil bow your mind. And I am keeping off showing Dan Spiegle's impressive Hopalong Cassidy until I have a longer run to show. I have so many seperate sundays with that strip, that I have to put my papers in order to see where to start first.
And I haven't even scratched the surface on Boy's Life.
A series on all the different crime strips from the fifties, including Perry Mason and Dragnet will also surface one day. Oh and I am loking for samples of Warren Tuffts's science fiction parody, which ran for half a year while he was preparing Lance. Maybe I should just show the four I have.
Blogspot informs me that I have reached the 65% level, so I can go on quite some time before it is going to cost me money, bt at some point I will also put up a lot more doubles and comic book material for sale, to pay for additional costs.
Well, enough from me. I have to finish packing. Here's Hank Ketcham.
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