Having had a proposed book scooped twice while keeping it a secret I have decided to go the other way mith my next favorite project. I have said here once and will say it again, that I would love to do a book on all the newspaper strip and comic book Milton Caniff illustrators, called School of Rembrandt. At least then I can point to this post and say: "Yous tole my idea!". Caniff is known als the Rembrandt of comics and he influenced two whole generations of newspaper and comic strip artists, hence the name. Some of those he taught himself, the same way Rembrandt tought his assistants. Some were influenced just by trying to imitate his style, which was very suited to the quick and easy demands of comic especially, while still delevering a solid look.
Of the first group Ray Bailey is one of the most impressive. His work is so similar to that of Caniff, that some people have wondered if some things we associate with the master himself (like the 'standing rock formation' that appears in many of his backgrounds) are not in fact done by Bailey (who did background and used the 'standing rock formation' in almost all of his subsequent series). In this style Bailey drew not one but two succesful newspaper strips, both running for a couple of years. he then returned to Caniff to do the Steve Canyon comic book series and who knows what else.
Of the two strips Bailey did, Bruce Gentry and Ton Corbett, it's the first that escapes me the most. I would loe to have a lager run, especially of the Sundays. But I don't know if it is all the attention that I have given this artist here or of if peope are discovering him on his own, whenever I see Bruce Gentry strips or Sundays for sale on ebay or at some seller or auction house, they are always scooped up by other willing to pay really high prices for them. Like this ebay lot, which also included some Rex Morgan strips. I am sharing them from my files anyway, in the hope that one day a complete collection or this series (or at least one full story for my School of Rembrandt book) can be found.
Of course, I have a lot of Bruce Gentry material in black and white as well, from various online resources. But unfortunately, the Gentry Sundays are so lushly colored, that the black and white copies often don't do it justice.
5 comments:
Interesting idea on a book on the followers of Caniff's style, but there must've been hundreds if you count other artists all over the world (Argentina and Europe, were many artists also followed his style; to name only a few: Hugo Pratt, Hubinon who drew Buck Danny among others, and even Asterix's own Uderzo when he drew Tanguy and Laverdure, and on and on). And in America: it seems every comic book artist during the fifties drew like Caniff...
It would be close to an encyclopedia of Caniff clones and imitators.
Yep, thatwould be the case if everyone had the same level of influence. But there is a group of artists (most of them shown here) whose influence is so palpable that you could show a tory each. Apart from Ray Bailey, on the story strip front I would include Mel Graff (although it could be argued he was more influenced by Sickles then Caniff), Andriola, Elias, Robbins, Raab, Heilman, Val Heinz, George Tuska, Overguard and Kotzky, but only using their most Canifflike work. Then there are a couple of comic book artists who did work that was made to look like Caniff, like Elias in his Hotshot short stories, some of the comic book work of Bailey and Bill Draut. All the others, good as they were, were just influenced by Caniif, Toth, Infantino, Hasen, etc in the first line and Kirby, Meskin and others in the second line. They wold get a mention and a small show in the accompanying text, as well as Europeans such as Pratt (who even did a Fanous Artist course and book in Argentina, where he drew even more from Caniff - there's a great Italian laguage book about that I recommend). Believe me, apart from getting good material for the reprints (I have some, but not all) the book would be easy to make and fun to read.
"Bruce Gentry" was marketed to papers who were unable to get "Steve Canyon" (either because of unaffordability, or a rival paper getting it first). It was popular enough for Columbia to make a serial based on the stip.
Oops, I meant "strip." (And could you delete that spam ad above, Ger?)
Of course Bruce Gentry was started a year before steve Canyon did. If Bailey 'stole' the idea of a postwar aviator having adventure in a far away land (in Gentry's case Sout America), Caniff didn't mind much, as he took Bailey back to do the Canyon comic book ten years later. In fact, Bruce Gentry's fate was sealed when he went with a smaller syndicate, that didn;t have the cloud to force the strip unto it's clients. It's a wonder it even did so well, but that must be due to the great looking art. The stories were okay, but Bailey lacked Caniff's talent of drawing the reader in by his pure power of storytelling.
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