The Fabuleous Fifties

A Modern Stone Age Family

Tuesday Comic Strip Day.

I have had some time to scan, so here are the third week of the Flintstones as well as the next four Sundays, continuing from where I left off last time.

After that I have two special illustrations, which were sent to me by Paul Spector, Irv Spector's so. Irv Spector was a cartoonist, strip artist and animator who was working at the Famous/Paramount Studio's at the time The Flintstones first appeared. In his archives, Paul Spector (who has a terrific blog dvoted to his father's work at http://irvspector.blogspot.com/, where you can see all sorts of great work by this artist) found two pieces related to The Flntstones, though. Two clippings from the newspaper strip, dated 11-7-1962 and 11-17-1962 and a page of sketches. Paul assumes these are efforts to try and tell jokes with these characters. As his father already had a job at that point, there is no reason to assume that he would be looking for an assignment. My guess (which I am floating here for the first time, so I hope Paul will respond to it in te comments section) is, that the sketches ook a lt like the sort of first sketches an artis does when he is trying to turn a thumbnail into a sketched page. Very often, the artist will try to compose each panel on a seperate sheet, before using a lightbox to place it unto the final page. Which would suggest that these are indeed sketches for pages that were finished. We know The Flinstones and Yogi Bear were produced by teams of artists, so it is not strange that Irv Spector could have been asked to help out in a pinch. The fact that the characters may not be totally on model in every pose doesn't matter, as they probably would have been inked by someone else. I am still looking at Sundays from late 1962 unwards to see if I can find any trace of these gags. Paul also mentions that the subject of one f them is similar to a Coogie page spector once did, so they may also be gags he wrote himself. Still, these do not look like script sketches but more like a by product of the finished art.