Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Bear With Me

Tuesday Comic Strip Day.

The plight of the blogger is a heavy one. Take today's post. I would love to share with you som eof the huge amount of color Yogi Bear Sundays I have. But to do that, I have to scan them. As it happens, most of those Yogi Bear Sundays are in newspapers that have a lot of other interesting strips. When I am considering doing some scan work, I have to make a choice to either just scan the Yogi Bears and get the papers out again when I want to do the next strip. Or I scan everything from that paper at once, but that makes the work quite slow. In either case, I have a stack of newspapers sitting besides my scanner, filling up my work room with a lot of papers and all of the smell that goes with that. Which leads to my wife comlaining she can smell it coming down the stairs (and she isn't even exaggerating). Choices, choices.

In the meantime, here a a lot of black and white Yogi's. Still a pretty amazing strip.












8 comments:

David R said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
David R said...

The first bunch doesn't look like Gene's work to me. Is that truly who it is?

Ger Apeldoorn said...

John Kircfalusi noted this too and did a post about it. I couldn't find it right away, but he noted how the first few Yogo's might have been done by someone else, maybe even following a more original character design or something like that. I did find a post (at http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2010/06/eisenberg-and-hazelton-contrasted.html) where he writes about the difference in style between Gene Hazelton and Harvey Eisenberg, who both worked on this strip (and the Flintstones, I think). Either way, the Hazelton attribution should be taken with a grain of salt, as he was the supervisor of Yogi and the Flintstones and sometimes whole months of either strip was done by someone else. If you click to Irv Spector's son's blog, you'll find he shows a couple of gags that were drawn by his father...

Alberto said...

Hi Ger:
Great post, as usual.
For those who may be concerned, the Yogi Bear Sundays you posted were mostly written by Gene Hazelton, whereas the art was done by Gene Hazelton+Joe Messerli (1st page, dated 2/5), Harvey Eiseberg+Joe Messerli (3/19 and 3/26), and Jerry Eisenberg+Lee Hooper (remaining pages).
When Harvey died in 1965, his son Jerry took over the Yogi Bear dailies and Sundays, continuining to pencil both until 1969. Then Hazelton took over as the main penciller (Bob Singer drew some pages in 1970), with Tony DiPaolo inking. The dailies apparently ended in 1969, whereas the Sundays went on until 1981.
Bestest,
Alberto

Ger Apeldoorn said...

Alberto,

Thanks for the info. I hope we can one day meet and exchange notes and ideas. You are one of the most knowledgable fan/historians I know about what is in fact a very underresearched area of American comics and newspaper strips. I didn't know there was a yogi daily, but will look for it.

Alberto said...

Ger:

Thanks for your appreciation.

The Yogi Bear daily was in fact a captioned gag panel. It started on Dec. 10, 1962 in the Los Angeles Times, but the actual start date might be an earlier one. I have a couple of proof sheets that Gene Hazelton sent me years ago. If you are interested and wish to run a few in your blog, I can send you scans, but how?

Best,
Alberto

rodineisilveira said...

It's also included on this topic, that Yogi Bear Sunday page from Christmas 1968, drawn by Pete Alvarado (which has the policeman with a design à la Walter Clinton [with the low ear]).
This Sunday page was shown in the Mark Christiansen's blog (http://marksotherstuff.blogspot.com).

rodineisilveira said...

The first Yogi Bear Sunday page was drawn by Tony Rivera; and it had as base, the Yogi Bear episode Do or Diet, originally featured in the 3rd season (1960-61) from The Huckleberry Hound Show (Hanna-Barbera/Columbia Pictures, 1958-62). This same episode also was shown in the classical Yogi Bear Show (Hanna-Barbera/Columbia Pictures, 1960-63).