The Fabuleous Fifties

Oksnay On The Oozisay

Tuesday Comic Strip Day.

My new friend Bob Bailey told me in an e-mail that he used to take classes at Joe Kubert's school and that one of his teachers was DC artist Bob Oksner. We were talking about Mort Drucker and apparently Oksner never realized that for years Drucker did the Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis and the Bob Hope books in his style. Anyway, he also mentioned a comic strip version of the Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman television show. That apparently never came to anything, since I had never heard from it and couldn't find any samples on NewspaperArchive. What I did find (and had come across earlier) were samples of Oksner's other shortlived strip Soozi. Soozi ran from Februari toDecember 1967. I had read somewhere that Oksner hated doing the strip and was glad it was cancelled. I don't think he would have hated it so much if it had been a succes, but there you go. And indeed, the gags were pretty horrible. they were in the same dumb blonde type that Stan Lee and Dan DeCarlo used to do with My Friend Irma. But because it was ten to twenty years later and because the writer wasn't the easy dumb wit Stan Lee was, it all falls flat. Hey, it's even a bit offensive. That's not to say Oksner is entirely without blame. His Soozi, cute though she is, tends to stand in a set number of poses and her boyfriend is a cheap imitation of his own Jerry Lewis character. I think Oksner's earlier comic strip I Love Lucy was a lot better. I am including a couple of those, even though you can probably find the comic book reprint of them that was done some ago. These are from February, March and April. I'll have more of the later run and three more Sundays at a later date.