Friday Comic Book Day.
As promised, here is more of Bob Oksner's career. We start with a late sample of his version of Bob Hope's Adventures. By this time, it had become hard to distinguish Oksner's style from that of the previous artist on this series, Mort Drucker. Decades earlir, Drucker had started out as a stand-in of Oksner, working on the same strips in a similar style. But by now, Drucker had become a superstar Mad artist. Much of Drucker's early career has not been chronicled, since he started out as a filler artist on staff at DC. But I'll get to that someday, today we do Bob Oksner. Next tuesday, I will show some of Oksner's later newspaper work, but here we have a sampling of his comic book career.
At first I had another Bob Hope story here, but BookSteve alerted me to the fact that it wasn't by Oksner. The GCD gives it to Carmine Infantino and that is very possible (although I can't see it myself). I had looked there, but didn't scroll past the credit for the cover, whch is by Oksner. And I did notice it was different from his earlier work. But the two issues befre that had been by him and I just assumed this one was as well.
Well, rather than remove it and convine it to blogger limbo, I thought I'd let is stand as another view of Bob Hope. More Oksner after that, though...
Oksner had also worked on the earlier issues of Bob Hope, doing several fillers such as Miss Beverly Hills of Hollywood, which also was a solo book series. The latter especially was Oksner at his best. For those of you who only know him as the artist of Angel and the Ape or the revival of Plastic Man, this may be a revelation.
After that, Oksner worked on Leave it too Binky, a fairly lightweight series. Then he tried his hand at a more serious style, doing stories for sf titles Strange Adventures and Mystery in Space alongsized DC greats such as Alex Toth, Carmine Infantino and Gil Kane. He was also on eof the original team of artists working for DC's new war titles, before 'new' talents such as Joe Kubert, Ross Andru and Jerry Grandietti joined the roster. Impressive as these stories are, Oksner returned to lighter tyle again for The Adventues of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, which he stuck with for many years (including the Sgt. Bilko books). All in all a fascinating artist, whose ease with brush and pencil sometimes hurt his artistry.
5 comments:
It's such a shame the much of the best of Oskner's work was on books that probably won't ever be reprinted. I'd love a collection of Bob Hope or Jerry Lewis featuring his artwork. A truely great artist who could turn his hand to anything.
To me, Oskner got better and better to the end. He started with DC's late 40s house style -- timidly dynamic,m you could say -- but a little better and cleaner. But his late pencils... the babes... the best. (I'm thinking mostly of his Supergirl work. And he shoulda had a run on Wonder Woman; coulda been historic.) And I'd say he adjusted well to the reduced art boards -- may have actually been good for him.
Here's the problem. That first Bob Hope you have? That isn't Oksner. Definitely Carmine Infantino but the layouts look like Joe Orlando so might be Infantino inking Joe. GCD says it's Carmine on pencils AND inks, though. Great Oksner cover though!
Yes, the March Bobo Hope is by Carmine.
You'll want to use your “ Walter Gibson” tag for “Hands from Nowhere”.
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