Friday, January 31, 2014

No Draut About It

Thursday Story Strip Day.

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.

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Let's Call Apeldoorn

Wednesday Advertising Day.

Here is a commercial with my brother playing the 'small buyer' in a commercial for 'big buyer' Beter Bed.



He is as funny as always. But with less screen time than his last one, where he plays a guy trying to explain a road accident to a not very smart telephone operator.




Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Military Hero

Tuesday Comic Strip Day.

WWII funnyman Sad Sack was made for army newspapers, but apprently t was ditributed to normal newspapers as well. And in some cases as a daily, so who knows what was up.


Monday, January 27, 2014

Ketcham Hitchem

Two more early Hank Ketcham cartoons I should get more of these... and I will.

Mort Meeskeen

Sunday Meskin Measures.

The next installment in this littlerun of stories Mort Meskin did for Prize Comics Western in the mid fifties, is one of a few stories he did with Bill Draut. Like Meskin, Draut was an alumnus from the Simon/Kirby studios and their styles fit very well together. Since Meskin could do the whole job himself, it is not clear why he (or the editor) farmed this one out. It looks to me as if the two really worked togter here, with Meskin pencilling and Bill Draut inking and possibly adding to the pencils where necessary. The resut is a much slicker Meskin job than some of his others. With the added pleasure of it being unreadable because of the pidgin Spanish the hero of the story uses...

No Dope

Saturday Leftover day.

I am very interested in the work of comic and newspaper strip artists while they were enlisted in the army. I am also very interested in the work of Will Eisner. So it figures that I have tried to get as much as possible from the work Eisner did from late 1942 to the end of the work with his army paper in Aberdeen and later with the Ordnance Unit. To my surprise, a random search on ebay showed me that there is a British firm that manufactures reprints of some of Eisner's war posters featuring Joe Dope (a character that he used fro his earliest war work to PS magazine, with a newspaper strip version for army newspapers in between). I am showing here what they have got, but it seems that is only a fraction of Eisner's actual output. Sadly this influential period of Eisner's work, that shows his growth of an artist without the normal use of assistants, has never been fully researched or reprinted.


Saturday, January 25, 2014

Crime Specialist

Friday Comic Book Day.

Bernie Krigstein is best know for his ground breaking work for EC in the early to mid fifties. I have collected most of his work for Stan Lee's Timely Atlas before and after his EC period. ALong the way I also picjed up some of the work he did for Hillman titles like Real Clue, Diamond Western and Indian Fighters. But here is one I never saw before.