Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Yabba-Dabba-Bear!

Tuesday Comic Strip Day.

Celebrating my 52th birthday. Well, at least I got my health.

This weekend I was talking to Daan Jippes about the Flintstones covers he did at the beginning of his career. I showed those in an earlier post, so if you follow the tag you'll find them. I assumed he was inspired by Gene Hazelton, but he said he was trying to channel Harvey Eisenberg for those covers. Now Eisenberg is more known for the Yogi Bear strips he did at the same time as the Flintstones strip started. I have always found the Flintstones strip funnier, so I decided to show your four of each alongside each other. They were often together in papers as well.










5 comments:

Peter Huggan said...

Wow, Daan Jippes is my hero! Those Gladstone comic covers he did in the 80's were a big inspiration for me.

These strips look like Eisenberg's layouts and pencils with Hazelton's inks...possibly? Some panels look like pure Hazelton. I think Eisenberg passed away around 1965 so maybe Hazelton was assuming more duties. Anyways, thanks for sharing these!

Ger Apeldoorn said...

My guess is Hazelton is more involved in the Yogi Bear strips than the Flintstones here. They are all from the first year of the strip, 1961. I hope you followed the link to the Jippes covers. I proposed a Daan Jippes Comic Book Masters to Jon Morrow once, but he didn't bite. Too bad. Apart from the obvious Duck work he did (and still does), it would have included his imitations of Uderzo, Franquin, Mort Drucker, Mort Walker and Bud Blake, as well as original work for Pep, Donald Duck and a host of other magazines and samples of his years in animation at Disney (on Aladin and the Three Musketeers, for instance) and others (Balto, anyone?), designs for the Care Bears series, his Donald and Mickey newspaper strips and much much more. This weekend he told me he worked on an earlier script version of Flushed Away, for God's sake!

Peter Huggan said...

Hi Ger,
Sorry I forgot to say happy birthday!

Yes, Daan's Flintstone covers are amazing too. He really knows how to "push a pose" but still keep it totally on model. Actually, I like these covers BETTER than Eisenberg whose covers sometimes seems quite stiff.

Wow, Daan did work for Aardman on Flushed Away? Was it developing character designs or some early boards? I've seen his Balto storysketch boards...really, really nice stuff, of course.

Yes, I also can't believe there isn't a published collection of Daan's work available. You could try Brandstudio Press, that's the publisher for Stephen Silver's portfolio of character designs. Probably 5 billion copyright clearances to obtain to publish most of Daan's stuff, sadly.

Joakim Gunnarsson said...

Harvey Eisenberg did some really amazing artwork back in the 40's and early 50's and I can see why Daan likes his stuff. By the late 50's and the early 60's his work had a stiff feeling, lacking much of the charm his earlier stuff had.
I posted some nice pieces on my blog recently:
http://sekvenskonst.blogspot.com/2011/03/tom-and-jerry.html

rodineisilveira said...

Here's a mix of the Yogi Bear and Flintstones Sunday pages.
The Yogi Bear Sunday pages shown at this topic were all drawn by the legendary Harvey Eisenberg (the "Carl Barks from Hanna-Barbera").
And the Flintstones Sunday pages depicted on this same topic, were drawn by a variety of artists: Gene Hazelton, Harvey Eisenberg, Dale Hale and Dick "Bick" Bickenbach.