Thursday Story Strip Day.
I interrupt the run of The Lone Spaceman for a new installment of another space opera I have been showing here... the next month of Ray Bailey's Tom Corbett, Space Cadett. I have represented this strip here from the beginning, using scans sent by me from a regular visitor of this blog, which were taken from a reprint of the dailies in the eighties or so. Last time I did this, I noticed that somewhere in 1952 the Sundays changed from stand alone gag strips to pages that were continuing the weekday storyline, so I am adding those (from NewspaperArchive). Een though they are from microfiche and not in colot, you can see how much work Bailey put into them.
4 comments:
The more I see of "Tom Corbett" the more I think the strip was Ray Bailey's finest hour. He put more work into it than anything I've seen from his comic book career.
I continue to be fascinated by how he draws realistic, rendered-up heads from time to time. It seems almost as if he were toying with the idea of "un-Caniffing" his style, but for whatever reason decided not to. I've never seen him draw in this manner in his later work, even when working from photo reference (e.g. Richard Boone in "Have Gun Will Travel"). Another minor mystery of comics.
I have seen one or two samples of those more realisticly drawn faces in some of his later work. He seemed to use this trick only for a particular kind of close-up and I am no sure if it really was an attempt at uncaniffing or just a more personal device he had added to his storytelling bag of tricks.
I will continue with some more Tom Corbett, although I have run out of Eclipse material and the future installments may be a bit more spotty. After that I will show Bruce Gentry which wil show that Tom Corbett may have been his finest hour (due to the drawing possibillities the subject offered) but Bruce Gentry easily out Steve Canyoned Caniff's air pilot hero a year before he appeared himself.
Hi Ger,
Thanks for posting those Sundays. I am (very) slowly scanning the early Tom Corbett strips from Eclipse and I have found a decent source for the strips post the Eclipse run. Have many of the dailies up to 3/1953 at this point. Between the two of us we might be able to put a full run together.
I got your new scans. My source for the dailies is quite big, as you can see from the later july samples. There was a tabloid and a normal version of that paper at Newspaper Archive and in the normal one Tom Corbett got quite a bit of room. Imagine getting that o your doorstep every day. I have one more color Sunday from 1953, which I'l save until then.
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