Thursday Story Strip Day.
For those of you still not convinced that Lou Fine's later work was as good as, if not better than his early stuff and for all of you who can't get enough of some classic newspaper soap opera, here is the foruth Adam Ames adventure from 1960. Will Eisner used to say that drawing a newpaper strip was like conducting an orchestra in a phone booth. Well, Eisner never did draw a newspaper strip himself and Lou Fine proved it could be done.
4 comments:
Fine's art on this strip is excellent. I prefer this realistic work to his over-the-top Golden Age drawing--but I love that stuff, too! There was a romance and exuberance to his superhero art that made up for the crazy poses and exaggerated characters.
On the other hand Fine's art in Adam Ames seems more heartfelt than his later Peter Scratch, even though (so I understand) the latter was his pet project.
The story is well-written, but it dredges up every 1950s stereotype about teenagers and male-female relationships.
I laughed to see how much the old "do you really need those glasses?" scene still makes me cringe. I started wearing glasses in elementary school, and that cliche was the bane of my youth. You'd be amazed by the amount of cultural propaganda back then saying that wearers of glasses were unattractive, unhip, and above all undateable.
I agree that Adam Admes seems much better drawn than Peter Scratch. One of the reasons may be that I get the impression Ames was drawn bigger. There is just more there. I would have loved to have seen what he would have done with a Sunday page. There was a Scratch Sunday and it is pretty disappointing. What I don't like is that at the end of the sixties most of these realists went the way of the Spanish and Phillipaen artists... even Neal Adams was never the same after he met Nestor Redondo. I will show some of those Scratch Sundays in the weekend.
Fine's work is too apples and oranges. Hardly any connection between early golden age work and the much later strip. Both awesome but in ways too radically different for any meaningful comparison. Now if you want to compare how much Neal Adams' current Batman story sucks in every way compared to his 60s/70s work, that comparison is easily doable :)
Eisner drew a daily Spirit strip before he went into the Army, and also shopped around a Little Orphan Annie-type soap after the war.
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