Wednesday, March 10, 2010

A Saint of All Causes

Wednesday Advertising Day.

I am in bed with a flue I caught from my wife (already this marriage thing is getting me down), do I have to keep it simple today. From my backlog, a little something from an artist I have always compared to yesterday's Bob Oksner in my mind - although, now that I think about it there seems to be little reason to. Maybe it's the beautiful girls they both draw. The artist is Tarzan/Long Sam/The Saint/Secret Agent X-9/Robin Malone artist Bob Lubbers. I am preparing a longer run of Long Sam for you for a later date, as well as a look at his work for The Saint as a part of a series of posts about that strip and his work for Secret Agent X-9 for a series about that strip. And believe me, if I had any color samples to share from Robin Malone, I'd do that too. There were some over at Joakim Gunnarson's blog Sekvenkonst and they looked gorgeous, possibly the best colored strip of it's period. I am including a Saint Sunday from the period he took over the strip in 1959/60 (before handing it over to Doug Wildey). Unsigned, it's clearly his. He tries to adopt the style of John spranger, who did The Saint before him seems to have started this story. Incredebly, he was still doing Long Sam at that time as well.

April 15 1951:


Oct 4 1959:

2 comments:

Frank M. Young said...

I didn't know Bob Lubbers drew THE SAINT... and in a weird, cramped style, nonetheless!

I'd love to see more of his work, especially the ROBIN MALONE Sundays in color. Some brilliant and innovative use of comix color in those!

Hope your flu flees fast!

Booksteve said...

I've always been fascinated by LONG SAM since I found a stray example on a Sunday comics page stuffed into my mother's old suitcase many years ago as padding!

Looking forward to that post!