Monday, April 26, 2010

Roland, Roland, Roland...

Monday Cartoon Day

Roland Coe was a famous cartoonist from the forties, who is mentioned in many of the 'best cartoons of the year' books of that period. His most popular work was a boyscout series for The Satorday Evening Post. It's all pretty innocent and not nearly as sharp as the cartoons done by the new generation of cartoonists that had just returned from the war. Still, his style is not entirely stuck in the thirties and he seems to have had an influence on some of the 'new' cartoonists, especially Dik Browne. Some of that influence must have come from the advertising work that he started doing after the war, which I will show next wednesday. Today I have some samples of a daily cartoons he did for most of the forties. One of those forgotten gems, I like it a lot better than the boyscout series, which only seems to have been remembered because it had regular characters.

The eariest I could find are from 1944/5:










The latest I could find is from 1952:


And these are somewhere inbetween, I guess:
cartoon









These last three, also undated may be earlier. The style here is more along the lines of William Galbreath's Side Glances.



2 comments:

S. said...

Crosstown was almost certainly running in the 30's because I have a book collection by Coe from that decade with of that same name. Good stuff too although much broader in his cartoon style.
As you said, a lot of this work is closer to "Side Glances " in its style. He seems to have "slicked up" during the war years.

Thanks for posting this work. Funny, lovely cartoons.

Tom Barrister said...

Coe was publishing cartoons in the 1930s.