Tuesday, May 19, 2015

Pushing Out the Barrow

Monday Cartoon Day.

Sunday supplements carrying the Associated Press strips must be among the most rare out there. They had a great roster of talent and quite few successful series, such as Scorchy Smith, Patsy in Hollywood, Oaky Doaks and Dicky Dare. But most of these strips were sold to small papers that only had daily editions. The only Sundays I have even found are from the late forties, with the ones from the early fifties and the early to mid forties among the most rare. I have never seen Sunday pages from Frank Robbins' Scorchy Smith, or the version of that strip done from 1952 onwards by A. C. Hollingsworth and George Tuska. Among the lesser known strips from this syndicate is Hank Barrow's Things To Come, a delightful Sunday only strip about future inventions. When Barrow left in the late forties the art was taken over by another artist who kept the project going till 1953. I'd love to see more of these in color, but the black and white source I found a pretty good.

5 comments:

jhegenbe said...

I LOVE THI STUFF.

Are you sayimg that Harold Robbins wrote the Scorchy Smith sunday that you are showing near the end of this batch?

Ger Apeldoorn said...

Robbins drew the Scorchy Smith strip from 1939 to 194 or thereabouts. I don't think he wrote them. All of the dailies have been reprinted by Big Fun and I can recommend those books. The Sundays are superrare, but I did get a long run together with these Things To Come. A misnaming is the cause of Scorchy being here. I am taking it out so I can show a longer run later.

fortunato said...

FRANK Robbins, not Harold! (Obviously) ;P

Joakim Gunnarsson said...

The New York Post ran Scorchy Smith by Frank Robbins in their sunday section.
That might be a lead if you have access to a microfilm service.

Alex van Koten said...

Super leuk Ger!