The Fabuleous Fifties

Sunday Fillers

Thursday Story Strip Day.

Two oddities today. First of, a couple of Sundays from The Saint from 1956. Earlier I showed the whole of the replacement run by Bob Lubbers from late 1959. Researching that, I found an online source that stated that Lubbers had helped artist John Spranger out before in the midfifties. I wonder if the two Sundays from April and June might be samples of that. The first one here, from February, is in what I would call John Spranger's style at that time. The second one I am not so sure. The third one is not by Spranger and could be by Lubbers, if you look at the background figures. Still, that would make it awfully close to his replacement run on The Heart of Juliet Jones in September of that same year...





After that four Sunday Scorchy Smith's I had to dig out. When I wrote about Al Hollingsworth, I said I might have a couple of his Scorchy Smith Sundays from 1953/54, which were so bad I didn't scan them the first time around. After I dug them out, I saw there was another reason I didn't scan them: they aren't by Hollingsworth, but by his predessor on the strip, Rodlow Willard. And they are pretty bad indeed. Still, they are far better than Willard's work on the dailies and they are extremely rare. I don't know how many papers had the Sunay version of this strip, buthe must have done them for years and yet I have never seen any, except for these (which came on the back of Patsy in Hollywood, another strip that was once drawn by a famous artist, from the same syndicate, Associated Press). I hope to one day find some of Hollingsworth's samples, if there are any. I think there are, I recall seeing an original page somewhere...






Thanks to the contibution of my commenters I am able to show two actual Hollingsworth Sundays, taken from the original art website comicartfans.com and a bit of searching also gave me one more from the Heritage Auction site as well as a slightly later produced `sunday for Marlin Keel. The first one shows how Hollingsworth, wrking in his own style, did take over Willard's design of the character.