Monday Cartoon Day.
Followrs of this blog will know there are two things I like above all: odd strips or panels and artists influenced by Milt Caniff. So here is one 1948 panel that combines both. Tested Tips by Jack and Betty Gray is similar to Know Your Mind in that it seems to be some sort of women's magazine feature and it is drawn is a sort vague Caniffy style. Like Know Your Mind, the artis doing the illustration does not seem to have signed his work. I know there are two names on this panel, but I don't tink either Jack or Betty Gray are the artist. MY reasons for thinking this are threefold. First of all, I do not know of an artist called Jack or Betty Gray doing Caniff style artwork. Secondly, two years into the feature, the artist seem to have been replaced, without the names on the feature changing. And thirdly, I strongly suspect that this panel is the work of later Judge Parker artist Dan Heilman. Before Heilman did Parker, he worked on a strip called The american adventure, which I have shown here (and will again, since I have almost all of the Sundays - it's just a matter of clipping the dailies to go with it). The art here shows remarkable likeness to that work. If Heilman was the artist, he must have worked on bot features for a short while. The Amerikcan Adventure started somewhere in 1949 and the artist change on Tested Tips didn't come until early 1950. Still, I have seen most of the Caniff influenced artists from this period and Heilman is the closest fit.
Or maybe... just maybe... we could be looking at Lee Elias' earliest work...?
No comments:
Post a Comment