Sunday, February 22, 2015

A Boone To Mankind

Friday Comic Book Day.

Bob Oksner was a respected and talented artist, who is mainly known for his work on DC's Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis titles. He had three seperate newspaper strips in three seperate fases of his career. In the late forties he worked on the daily and Sunday strip Cairo Jones, in the fifties he did a shortlived I Love Lucy daily series and in the late sixties he drew Soozi (a strip he apparently did not like himself and could not get rid of soon enough). I have shown samples of all of these. In between he did tons of jobs for DC, veering from outright funny to light realism. And usually featuring pretty girls. In the mid fifties he did four issues of a unique Pat Boone comic book, also from DC, which featurd not only comic book stories, but also illustrated text features and fashion pages. A bit of a throughback to a genre that was more popular in the late forties, I have to say, but the style was unique. The comic book stories had no borders and no text balloons as such. Oksner used his most illustrative style for them, producing a forgotten but highly remarkable gem.

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