From the same paper as the Paul Norris illustrations I got several samples of Sargeant Stony Craig. A marine comic strip that seems to have run from late late thirties, so evenbefore the Second World War. Hete are a couple of scattered samples from early 1945, together with the first week of Bill Draut. He did the strip after leaving the army himself until somewhere in 1946. I have some samples of his work for army papers and even there he had adopted a faux Caniff style. Later on, he would become one of the more succesful and prominent Caniff style practitioners in comic books, mostly for companies such as Prize and Mainline, ofteen for or in the company of Jack Kirby. In the late fifties he moved to DC, where his style became more mainstream. he ended up losing most of the (interesting) Caniff touches while doing romance books for DC and later even Marvel. His development as an artist is the most typical example of a young artist influenced by Caniff ending up in what could be called mainstream American realism of the seventies - before it got blown away by the more showy art of Neal Adams and those more like him.
Here is the first week of his version of Stoney Craig and an interesting article about Draut and the strip from two months into his run.
I hope te be showing more.
2 comments:
Going to National in the 50s meant drawing as close to the Toth/Barry house style. If that wasn’t possible, then one was required to draw as unexciting as possible so responsible adults wouldn’t get upset seeing what Junior was reading.
Maybe the ideal example is Mort Meskin. His career ended with the dullest art of his career (but still pretty good, just the least of what he did). But look at nearly anything from National between the Toth era and late 60s: virtually every artist (it seems) did the dullest work of their careers at that time.
Good artists still did good art, but duller than anything else they did anywhere else -- other than Dell/Western/Gold Key, of course, maybe.
And even Toth did better at Dell! Worst example is Gene Colan, of course. Not only dd he draw duller, he was inked into oblivion by the house stylists and ithey convinced him that he was no good...!
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