The Fabuleous Fifties

Inks In Space

Thursday Story Strip Day.

Today, I am sharing the next month worth of Ray Bailey's Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. I have been sharing this gorgeous strip from the start, so use the tage if you want to find the start of this story. Ray Bailey was an assistant of Milt Caniff in the forties before going off to do his own strips. He started with Bruce Gentry, a Steve Canyon type that appeared a year before Canyon himself started. As Bailey was working in Canif's studio, he might have known aboy his boss' plans. Still, Caniff can't have minded much, because he continued using Bailey's services (for the Steve Canyon Dell comic book series of the fifties). Bailey started doing Tom Corbett, which also had a long life in comic books with work by different artists. It is a pretty good strip in it's juvinile space opera genre, but the main attraction is that it shows us what a Milt Caniff strip in space would have looked like.

At this point the Suday page was integrated into the story. Although you should really see it in color, I have included the three I could find of the four that should be there. Up till now I have been sing scans from the Eclise reprint series of the nineties. These had the attraction of being shot from very clean cyndicate proofs. The scans were provided by a regular of this blog, Tom. Either the Eclipse series was used up, or his scanner gave up or I mislaid his latest mails, but these are from Newspaper Archive, so slightly less clear. The paper they ere taken from did print them quite big, so they are better than could be expected.