Friday Comic Book Day.
Somewhere in the late forties Pogo creator Walt Kelly did a series of very interesting fantasy give-away comics for a brand of prepackaged brea called Peter Wheat. Peter Wheat was a small boy, who had aventures with a group of animal friends, such as beetles and birds, who were all about the same size as him. Walt Kelly drew these comics in the same style as his concurrent series The Little Rascals, which is now being reprinted by Fantagraphics in a handsome series of paperbacks. I don't think he wrote the Peter Wheat strips himself, for there is far to little slapstick in them, but
they are just as interesting, if not more so because of the fantasy angle. The books were given away for free with one o two loaves of bread and had to be folded together by the reader. This may account for the fact that they are so very rare.
Having read that Kelly left the series to another artist, who drew in his style, I was reluctant to declare several of the later samples I have as being by him, but when I recently found a few scans for a much later issue, which was clearly not drawn by Kelly, it was much easier to see the ones I did think were in Kelly's style probably were his. So here is anothe one, this time from Peter Wheat #20.
After that, you can see the later samples for yourself.
This post resulted in a very informative mail by one of my readers: "There are actually two different titles, Adventures of Peter Wheat and Peter Wheat News. The first was 16 pages, already glued together and complete. Peter Wheat News, where the Al Hubbard story you have at the end comes from, was a four-page advertising flyer where the last two pages could fold into a four-page mini-issue of Adventures. The stories from Peter Wheat News were normally 3 part serials, for a total of 12 pages. The Adventure issues are hard to find; the Peter Wheat News issues are at least ten times as rare." Since all of these pages are hopefully up for a long time, I welcome this type of comments. Another poster mentions Mary Janes and Snifles as another series by Al Hubbard. He also drew lots of comics for the European Duck titles, most notaby Fethry Duck (the scrips of which y Jay Kiney have recently been shown on David Gerstein's blog http://ramapithblog.blogspot.com/).
7 comments:
There are actually two different titles, Adventures of Peter Wheat and Peter Wheat News. The first was 16 pages, already glued together and complete. Peter Wheat News, where the Al Hubbard story you have at the end comes from, was a four-page advertising flyer where the last two pages could fold into a four-page mini-issue of Adventures. The stories from Peter Wheat News were normally 3 part serials, for a total of 12 pages. The Adventure issues are hard to find; the Peter Wheat News issues are at least ten times as rare.
The latter examples are not Kelly, but the guy what did Mary Jane and Sniffles in Looney Tunes (I think).
Thanks for the information, Eric. If you have any issues you would like to share, I would love to trade scans or other stuff (like some rare European Pogo-related items I should post one of these days). I wonder if there ever was an issue of the Pogo fanclub magazine about this series. I have #1 to #26, but all my efforts to reach Steve Thompson about getting #27 to #100 have failed. he just never answers his mail, even though it's still mentioned on the Pogo website.
Everything I have to scan is already posted on the goldenagecomics.co.uk website; I didn't hold back anything to trade. (The scans of both this issue and the 19 you posted earlier are mine; I'm very happy to see them getting more exposure.) I'm still looking for more issues, though; I'll let you know if I find any. Everything I've seen suggests Kelly wrote most of his issues; it's possible Del Connell (who wrote the Hubbard issues) wrote or co-wrote some of the last year of Kelly drawn stories. And yes, jhegenbe, Al Hubbard drew Mary Jane and Sniffles for many years; it's one of my all-time favorite series. Hubbard is horribly underrated, in my opinion; he's not in Kelly's league, but who is?
Thanks for naming the :guy". I love his work, too. But I really love Kelly's Peter Wheat more.
Al Hubbard never drew write any of his comics, but as you can see was a good draftsman (which makes sense, as that is what he started his career as - an airplane daftsman).
hubbard was west coast - and worked at the Sangor Shop doing comic books, moving on to Western.
I only have a half dozen or so Hubbard Peter Wheats, given to me by a friend from his duplicates - he's not online. I dont think he's ever finished his collection of Kelly Peter Wheates, but he certainly has most of them.
If anybody cares, I just scanned and posted 5 more issues of Adventures of Peter Wheat; they're all available for download at the goldenagecomics.co.uk site. Sadly, the only Kelly issue is 26; the others are by Del Connell and Al Hubbard.
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