Thursday, September 15, 2011

You Are Not Malone

Thursday Story Strip Day.

After doing the Tarzan strip in the early fifties, some of which I showed in the last few weeks, Bob Lubbers took on Long Sam. It was supposedly written by Al Capp, although his brother seems to have been the actual writer later on - and maybe from the start, I don't know. I have so many samples of this strip, that I am still trying to gather them all into some sort of nice presentation, so I am jumping ahead three strips to show his last newspaper strip effort (after ghosting the Saint and taking over Secret Agent X-9 under the pseudonym Bob Lewis... and it wouldn't surprise me if there were some years of doing Li'll Abner in there as well (or was that later, in the seventies?): Robin Malone. I first saw these on Joakim Gunnarson's blog Sekvenkonst in color. They are as prtty as all of Lubbers' work and probably even a bit better than anything he had done after Long Sam. So I went to NewspaperArchive and found me the start of this series, two months of Sundays plus the first two weeks of dailies. In the second week, Lubbers saw a chance to draw his erstwhile boss, Al Capp at a party where 'everye who is someone' is there. Capp was a very popular guest speaker back then, so that fits the bill.

I am not asking for a full reprint of Robin Malone. Not before we have all twelve years of Long Sam. But it would be nice to have some color samples. Like his earlier Tarzan and Long Sam, these Sundys seem to have been colored beautifully. This is such a consistant factor of his work that I guess he was involved in the coloring himself.






















No comments: