Saturday Leftover Day.
After writing my piece about Dave Sim's Glamourpuss this week, I went back to NewspaperArchive and tried to pull a full run of Stan Drake's illustrations for King Feature's weekly soap opera series Jan & Bill by Adele Garrison. What I ended up with and am showing here should be every episode of April to December 1951. There were more in 1952 (some of which I have shown earlier, follow the tag) but this seems to be where Drake's involvement with this feature started. Unfortunately, not having read the whole thing (and neither wil I expect you to do), I had a hell of a time to put it together. What should be a straightforward run of chapters, seems a jumble of stories and chapter numbers. So, using the story titles and the next week blurns, I set out to put them in the right order, only to fins a couple of strange gaps. The first story is almost complete. It seems to have a gap with #11 (possibly a gaffe on my part), but I am pretty sure that where I pick up with #12, it's still the same storyline. That story ends with chapter #21, announcing 'new adventures'. After that, unfortunately, I don't have the first episode of the New Adventures of Jan & Bill, but to make things even more complicated, the title drops the adage 'new adventures' after two more episodes. Still, the story titles and next week blurbs keep everything on line. After that it only becomes more complicated. The gaos get bigger and bigger, even though I am sure I have not missed out any large chuncks.. the pure number of scans here even preclude that. In 39 weeks there can't have been more than 39 pages, unless I missed a seperate serial running alongside this one. And to top it all, we end on a mysterious episode that seems to be Chapter #41. The end of the story dictates that it comes at the end of the christmas episodes, but it also mentions a murder attempt, which I am sure refers to the earlier story.
Anyway, the first story seems to be all there. Maybe someone at Classic Comics Press (the publishers of that wonderful collection of Drake's Heart of Juliet Jones, follow the link) will make sense of it today. Until then for you (and for Dave Sim) here is most of Stan Drake illustrations for 1951 - I think.
One episode missing...
First episode missing...
Some stuff missing...
One episode missing...
Some stuff missing...
2 comments:
"I gulped down a terrorized sob ....'STAN DRAKE' is a freak'in genius" !
Ger - I've got a few of these myself and it continues to amaze me how good Stan was. I believe the ones I have are a bit different. I'll have to dig them out and see. It's also quite possible that some of the orginal art may be located at Syracuse Univesity - Stan donated a lot of his work in the mid to late 50's to the school - lots of original Jones dailies and Sundays and various other items. I'll also to check to see if anything is there.
I also just got the rights to reprint a Stan Drake Interview conducted by Shel Dorf. It originally appeared in Comics Interview. This will be part of the first Sunday volune coming in 2011. Cheers, Charles
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