Wednesday Advertising Day.
Monday I showed a few cartoons from This Funny World, featuring some of the best and well known cartoonists of the late forties. Many of these cartoonists were given the chance to do a newspaper strip or a panel series of their own, either around that same time or anywhere into the fifties. In fact, all through the fifties most funny strip artists started out doing magazine cartoons. Not all of them were succefull at their first try, some not even at their second try. But the point is, thye were popular and carooning was seen as a breeding ground for new funny talent. So it comes as no surpise to see that many of these cartoonists were also used in advertising campaigns. Some campaigns used only the bigger names, but others used specificly from the 'new' crop. Wheaties seems to have been one of the latter ones, using current cartoonists for their ads in newspapers, magazines and comic books. Here are some samples of the comic book ads and three of the magazine ads I have scanned in myself.
After that, I have shown some more work of two of these cartoonists, who interest me specificly. First there is Roland Coe, an older cartoonist who was mostly known for a series of panels about Bioy Scouts in The Saturday Evening Post. But he also did a daily panel series all through the late forties.I have gather quite a few of them and will devote a seperate entry to this panel and his work on the Nebisco newspaper ad series, which seems to have been both an influence on the work of Dik Browne and the later Bud Blake. I have quite a few color samples of this His Nibbs series, I just haven't gotten around to scanning them yet.
But the cartoonist who nterests me the most at the moment is Dave Gerhard. He as a lively and loose style, which seems way ahoad of his time. Born in 1903, he was already in his forties when his work as a cartoonist really started to pay off, but he was never old school (until he sixties, when his work finally started to seem ldfashioned, along with that of a lot of guys ten years younger then him). He died in 2003, having reahed the respectable age of 100 years. He did several comic strip and panel series, none of which ever reached the top. His first was called Viewpoint and illustrated the differences between men and woman. His second and best known was Will-Yum, a lively drawn series about a kid being a kid. It even made it into three issues of a Four Color comic book drawn by Gerhard himself. Those of you who like Milt Gross will want to come back when I show sme of those stories on Friday. His third series was started when Will-Yum was still running and taken over by a different artist after a year or so. It was a funny strip called City Hall. I don't know if Gerhard was involved until the end, but at least he seems to have gone along with is times in producing a pretty sharp 'satirical' strip. Ater that Citizen Smith, a panel he did in the late sixties until his retirement in the seventies, seems like a pretty lame effort. In between those assignments he seems to have kept on producing and selling single cartoons. I ran across two. I'll have more of Viewpoint, Will-Yum (including som ecolor samples) and Citizen Smith at a later point.
From Adventure Comics #93:
From Adventure Comics #94:
From Adventure Comics #95:
From Adventure Comics #99:
From Adventure Comics #100:
From Adventure Comics #103:
From Adventure Comics #104:
From Saterday Evening Post June 1946:
From Liberty March 1948:
From Liberty Dec 1948:
Roland Coe
Aug 1-3 1946:
Feb 10 1946:
July 11 1948:
Aug 7 1948:
Dave Gerhard
Jan 11 1951:
Jan 12 1951:
July 6 1958:
Sept 6 1959:
May 15 1959:
May 16 1959:
May 12 1975:
Oct 16 1966:
Laff-A-Day Jan 10 1967:
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