Thursday Story Strip Day.
When I showed the Arrow comic section last week, I wrote that I only dug it out of my pile of stuff because I saw it had a Bruce Gentry page on the front. I was preparing a post about this late forties strip by Ray Bailey, whose Tom Corbett I have shown here (and will show again as soon as I have gathered a new month... with color pages coming up as well). I commented on the fact that Bruce Gentry seemed ilike a low rent version of Milt Caniff's Steve Canyon, with this difference that it actually started a full year before Steve Canyon did. Frequent commentor Smurfwhacker responded to that, saying he found Gentry to be less like Canyon that you might expect, based on the style. Althugh he agreed that both strips are similar because they are about flyers, to him Gentry seemed explicitly 'post-war' and Steve Canyon very much influenced by the war. That interesting fact makes it all the more bitter that Gentry was cancelled when the next war (in Korea) came along, while Steve Canyon flourished. In the end it was Caniff and Canyon's loyalty to the army and air force, that made the strip lose it's place in the late sixties but in the early fifties things seem to have been the other way around.
Anyway, I am glad to be able to repreent a full month of this strip here. I have chosen this single month in the third year of the strip, because it contains the one and only Sunday I have. And whatever the storyline of this strip, the Sunday is just gorgeous. I wish I had more and I wish I had more and better samples of the strip to show. As it is, I do have some runs from the earlier years, which I may share with you later. But since I don't think these strips are worth looking at if you can't read them, I will have some collecting to do before I am ready.
One strip missing.
1 comment:
Nice!! Thanks for posting these. The Sunday page is gorgeous.
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