Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Hardly Brothers

Wednesday Advertising Day.

Rusty and Dusty is another of those long running ad strips of the forties and fifties. New episodes seem to have been produced every two weeks from somewhere in early 1949 to at least 1956. I had shown a couple of later samples earlier, which I have incorporated in this post. After that I held on to my earlier samples, because I still don't know who drew this series. I don't even now if it was done by one artist or if the original artist waas replaced. I do think the earlier strips show some sign of Lou Fine's style, but I think he had other and better accounts at that time. Later on the strips got a bit more rushed, but if that is due to a change in artost of just a change in the amount of money and effort spend on the strips, I am not sure. Anyway, it was a remarkable series and I am glad to be able to show so many color and black and white samples.

Some of these strips also have The Trouble Twins attached to them, which famously is the strip that got Dik Browne the assignment to do Hi and Lois. Only the samples here are from 1955 and 1956, when Hi and Lois was already running. They could still be by Browne, though, who does not seem to have given up all his advertising work when he got the strip account.

Feb 13 1949:


July 24 1949:


March 12 1950:


Date unknown 1950:


Sept 29 1951:


Feb 17 1952:


March 17 1952:


April 13 1952:


Sept 7 1952:


Oct 5 1952:


Nov 2 1952:


June 7 1953:


July 7 1953:


Aug 8 1954:


Nov 11 1954:


Jan 30 1955:


Feb 27 1955:


May 22 1955:


July 10 1955:


Oct 9 1955:


June 3 1956:


Aug 16 1956:

2 comments:

Smurfswacker said...

It's great to see so many Rusty & Dusty strips. Hitherto I'd only seen a couple of samples, like the one I ran in my blog, from an old advertising course.

Rusty and Dusty seem to be the only 1950s comic strip heroes who were permitted to get their hair messed up (though of course they oiled it back in place by the end of the story).

Ger Apeldoorn said...

Hm... sure looks like Ken Bald to me.