Thursday, October 07, 2010

Hidden Treasures

Friday Comic Book Day.

Here are the final installments of Bob Powell's What a Work series. You can now enjoy all of them here on The Fabuleous Fifties. I think Powell is a vastly underrated artist whose wrok holds it own against that of Will Eisner. He has two strikes against him, one that he never had a break-out strip like the Spirit. As good an artist as Powell was, he was not as good a writer as Eisner (even though Eisner did employ others to do that for him in the end). Secondly, he died too young in the mid-sixties.

The response to these Powell posts have been very meager. Most of the other artists I have picked, have met with some sort of cheering. Powell's work has been met with a resounding silence. The Journalista blog found them interesting enough to link too them, but that is about all of the confirmation I have had. Apparently, my respect for the man's work is not shared as acutely by my readers as I would have thought. Still, the posts remain here for anyone to see and drop by, so I hope I may have attributed to his recognition in some way.

I will continue to post the rest of the Bat Masterson strips, even though they are muddy and all in all it seems to me Powell was less effective as a newspaper strip artist than he is here. I have seen many commercial or educational comics, like this is, but none of them have the daring page lay-out Powell uses. After this series he did another one about a Mexican priest, which I will share at a later point.























4 comments:

dylanio21 said...

I couldn't figure out how to message you but can you PLEASE tell me where the image from your banner came from ?
I can't figure out what comic it is from...

Please, please, please...or someone else ?
Anyone ?

Ger Apeldoorn said...

It's from Al Jaffee's Tall Tales. He used 'topper' gags such as this for his Sunday pages. The actual original page plus this topper can be found on my blog if you click on Al Jaffee...

None said...

Well I'm a big fan of Powell especially his romance work. His Work series is interesting stuff and I am glad to get a chance to see it but I am afraid I cannot get very excited about it.

Ger Apeldoorn said...

Harry, from what you tought us about Powell's work I get the impression that his romance work is the most likely to be primarely by one of his assistants. I like his 'darker' work best, the stories about less then perfect guys doing less then legal stuff.