Friday, January 17, 2014

A Jenny For Your Thoughts

Thursday Story Strip Day.

For years artic Marc Swayze wrote a column for the FCA section of Roy Thomas' Alter Ego. Swayze had only briefly worked in comics, first as an assistant to Flyin' Jenny's Russell Keaton, then for the CC Beck shop that did Captain Marvel and other strips for Fawcett, than back to the newspapers to do Flyin' Jenny himself and after that with Fawcett for several Captain Marvel related projects and lots of romance comics until the company folded in the early fifties. He used a lot of sketches and new artwork, but the amount of actual old stuff shown from this old comic and newspaper strip veteran was limited. Especially his work on Flyin' Jenny was underrepresented, mostly because there are collectors for the early aviation strip out there, but most concentrate on the Russel Keaton years. Keaton himself had a strong style that makes it hard to identify the work of his assistants. In 1942 Keaton surrendered the duties on his strip to female cartoonist Gladys Parker, who worked in the same thirties fashion illustration style as Keaton. She apparently stopped doing the strip somewhere in 1944, after which Swayze tok over. It is hard to determine when exactly wayze started drawing the fashionconcious adventure strip, because he didn't start signing it until Keaton's death in 194. The strip itself bearly survived the war and was cancelled somewhere in 1946.

I have gathered some samples here and there for the Swayze fans, but I am not yet ready to say indefinitely which strips were drawn by him and which ones weren't, other than the signed ones. So here is a selection of what I came across so far.


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