Thursday Comic Strip Day.
I ran into a great run of Sundays of Neal Adam's soap opera tour de force Ben Casey. Older collectors like me, have the complete daily run from the great Menommenee Fals Gazette reprint paper. The Sundays of this strip told a seperate story and are never reprinted, not even in magazine form. One of the reasons may be that thye o not do very well in black and white (except if you have one of th many orginals floating around), because it was colored as richly as it was drawn. The run I have here can get quite muddy sometimes. What makes it to good, is the fact that it is a run (and I can get more, up till the end of the strip in mid 1966) that consists completely of the three tier version. and it's complete, so for the first time in a long time you can actually read the stories.
After clipping a long run of Chris Welkin, Planeteer and iscovering that it was represented in full on www.ilovecomixarchive.com I went to have a look at what they had from Ben Casey. And indeed they did have all the dailies, but only a smattering of Sundays and many two tiers as well. I have represented a couple here, so you can see how much less impressive these two tier versions are. I don't think that was the case with all strip, but sadly many of them suffored that way. Also included here are a couple of tabloid versions of Ben Casey Sundays from Ilovecomix (which I highly recommend if you want to see more), which had one less panel than the three tier, in a unique cutting version I have never seen before. See if you can spot it. So who's doing the 92 page color book and what's the delay?
4 comments:
Thanks for posting these. I have always wanted to see a collection published myself.
Agreed. Needs to be collected. The worst thing you can say to any creative person is "Your old stuff was better" but this really is some of Neal's best work.
Hi, Thanks for posting these Sundays. Would you happen to have a higher resolution scan of the first sunday page, the 9/10 one? I was born that day and would love to be able to print it out and frame it. Thanks in advance. Gustavo Medina
I meant to say the 9/20.
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