Friday, January 29, 2010

Small Wonders

Thursday Story Strip Day.

I was all set to continue the run of George Tuska Buck Rogers strips lifted from NewspaperArchive I had started earlier (follow the tag for the first half month), when I found I already had a complete set of Tuska's strips, including color Sundays. I got them a couple of years ago from collector Alex Lane, a real science fiction fan who shared lots of googies with others years before I started my blog. I contacted him and asked if he would mind my sharing some of his hard work with you and he agreed.

His set starts with George Tuska's first full story and that is just where I had gotten. As you may know from the previous post, Tuska had taken over the strip rather abrubtly (in the middle of the week) from April 1st 1959. All through April the previous artist (Murphy Anderson) finished up the seperate Sunday storyline. Since Sunday stories were usually done in adnvance, he would probably have done those before quitting the daily strip. In fact, if his departure wasn't amicable, he may even have started a new Sunday line, but George Tuska or whoever wrote it or maybe even the syndicate decided that from Tuska's start the Sunday and Daily storylines would be combined. In the end Tuska only managed to do that for about a year, Alex informs me and even then he sometimes miscounted and had the Sunday run ahead or slow a week.

So here it is for you to enjoy. As with all artists shown here, I believe that George Tuska deserves a better place in the history of comic strips and books and I hope this series of posts will contribute to that.






















2 comments:

tom said...

This is great stuff - Thanks for posting

Operation GutterBall said...

It's too good!