Thursday, November 01, 2012

The Banter Prince

Thursday Story Strip Day

I wish I had more of these to show. Bodyguard was an interesting strip by Quality alumnus John Spranger. I have not seen enough samples to see what it ws about or where it was set, but it seems to have been about a bodyguard.

It was written by Lawrence Lariar, a famous cartoonist who also wrote crime novels and di more to promote cartons than anyone else with his Best Cartoons of the Year series, whoch ran at least from 1943 to 1959. e also wrote a strip called The Thropp Family, which was drawn for Liberty magazine in the mid forties by Don Komisarov and Lou Fine, which I will be actively looking for. The illustration I have is from Today's Inspiration, a blogger who usually posts about magazine illustrators, but occasionally drifts into this sort of territory as well. Check him out, I say.

Bodyguard was not the succes everyone thought it should be, so the name was changed to Ben Friday and the bodyguard angle was dropped. When that didn't help, on eof the side characters took over and the strip introduced some more humor with The Bantam Prince. Spranger left (to later do the Saint) and was replaced by Carl Pfeufer. More about those later incarnations, well.. later.





2 comments:

jhegenbe said...

Very Nice. Halfway between Denny Colt and Simon Templar.

Ger Apeldoorn said...

Yeah, a lot better than The Bantam Prince. But the Sundays have to be seen in color, all bw copies are illegible.