When Al Capp joined AP in 1932, he took over the Colonel Gilfeather panel from Dick Dugan and changed the name to Mr. Gilfeather. The character remained the same, a pompous blowhard. When Capp left later that year, the strip was continued by another new arrival, Milton Caniff. He kept the premiss the same for a vouple of months, but somewhere between february and July 1933 he started letting Gilfeather remenisce about his youth and in fact changed the premiss of the panel to Close To Home, a nostalgic panel in the manner of his idol H. T. Webster. I have shown Caniffs first panels some time ago, and some of his later nostalgic panels as well. But here are a couple of month I hadn't shown yet, when Gilfeather was still the main focus. The humor is repetative but the arwork shows that Caniff really was a remarkable artist. His style was changed forever when he met Noel Sickles, but underneath it all was a superb draftsman with a great sense of character, as we can see here. For more Close To Home follow the label.
2 comments:
It's interesting to see bits of Caniff's narrative and dialogue style crop up in these panels. Gilfeather's rainy day speech foreshadows those little moral speeches his characters delivered from time to time beginning in Terry and continuing through (usually on patriotic subjects) to Steve Canyon. Also I notice that Gilfeather resembles the way Caniff drew himself in caricatures.
Gilfeather comes off as a cross between Major Hoople of "Our Boarding House" and the radio character "The Great Gildersleeve."
Post a Comment