Wednesday Advertising Day.
Today's post is specially for Dutch superstar comic artist Daan Jippes. If you haven't heard of Daan, or seen his magnificent Duck work, check it out. Daan is one of those artistic chameleons I so much admire. There seems to be no style he can't imitate... and improve upon. He has done his own version of the styles of Mort Drcker, Ronald Searle, Gene Hazelton (doing covers for a Dutch Flintstone Monthly), André Franquin, Albert Uderzo, Jijé, Bud Blake, Mort Walker, Jan Kruis, early André Franquin, Floys Gottfredson ,Carl Barks, Al Taliaferro and Walt Kelly. For starters. He did comics, newspaper strips strips, advertising, animation and cartoon design. You'll probably have sen some of his work without knowing it. His latest Disney trionf is redrawing the stories Carl Barks wrote at the end of his career for artist Toni Strobl in his own lively version of Carl Barks style, hugely improving on Strobl's original. He also started his own strip series Havank, a strange little detective from the interbellum period, which he draws in the the franco-belgian style of Franquin and Tillieux he loved so much when he was a young kid. He is currently working on the third album. I once suggested to Twomorrows publications that they should do a Daan Jippes book in their Modern Masters series, but coudn't convince the editors. Maybe someday I will show some of Daan's work here, but I want to do it justice, so am taking it slow.
Anyway, Daan is a visitor to this blog and when I was at his work place last year, he showed me a piece of original art he had by Ray Bailey, whose work for Tom Corbett I had been showing here. Or at least he thought it might be by Bailey. It was a page of a 16 page information booklet featuring Steve Canyon, produced by the Harvey Company (who also did the Steve Canyon comic book series Bailey worked on). It turned out I had this book in my collection, so I could confirm his suspicion that he had page five of this propaganda piece and Caniff himself had had very little to do with it artwise (although it had been sold or given to him as a Caniff original).
So for Daan and for all of you, here is the 16 page special Steve Canyon adventure, in all likelyhood drawn and inked by Ray Biley, with maybe the heads of Steve Cayon done by Caniff himself.
And since I mentioned Daan work (much of which can be found online) I will close of with two rarely seen samples of his Flintstone covers from the start of his career.
6 comments:
That definitely looks like Ray Bailey, though he seems to have put more effort into imitating Caniff's 50's manner of inking folds than he did in the Canyon comic books, where he always used his own version of the style.
However I wonder if Caniff didn't ink Steve's heads, as he supposedly did in the comic books. They show the least Baileyishness. That's just my opinion.
what always suggests to me that Cannif, in his 1950s work, has added heads after the rest of the art has been done is the occasional ill-fitting one, such as the head in the last panel of page 7, which is quite out of proportion to the body it is supposedly attached to. This kind of misjudgment doesn't happen anywhere else in the 16 pages and would be unlikely for the artist responsible for the job, presumably Bailey.
Your friend does beautiful work.
You've inspired me to read some Milton Caniff once I'm done re-reading my Batman dailies for maybe...the third or fourth time in completion?
I typed a reply earlier this morning, which got lost in cyberspace. I a intrigued by your coment that the inking could be a little bit off for Bailey and will look into that.
I went back to look at the panel Eddie Campbell mentioned and I gotta say that's a pretty good sized melon there.
Love the panel layouts set to a nice 3 tier grid. Everything in it's place the way ot should be.
Reding R.C. Harvey's excellent Caniff biography "Meanwhile..." and have yet to get to any mention of Bailey.
Thanks for posting this. Still, that large head...
Big fan, by the way, of Eddie Cambell. I even used to buy the Bacchus comic. I am honored to have you among my visitors.
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