Sprawling Sparling

Friday Comic Book Day.

Jack Sparling was an interesting artist who worked in and out of newspaper comics for all his career. He did Hap Hopper in the early forties and moved on to Claire Voyant. I have shown some of the first and will show some of the latter. In the fifties he created Mr. Rubbles, a weird strip about an irish leprechaun influencing peoples lives. As I wrote when I showed some of it, I guess it was sold on the back of the succesful Irish themed movie(s) of that period, like Finian's Raibow and more specificly Disney's Darby O'Gill. After that he is mensioned as the artist of Sam Hill, which must have been some sort of adventure strip. I could never find more than a couple of very small samples of those. After that he workedon a strip called Honor Edens, which seems to have been some sort of detective strip (other than the name suggests). The copies I have of those are even worse than the Sam Hill ones. In between that he worked as an artist on comic books, usually in a very identifyable style. In the fifties you see him everywhere at the second rte companies, usually doing romance but sometimes also war stories (as in G.I. Joe or Harvey's war titles). Although he was a good storyteller, his work was usually unremarkable. But the early stories I want to show here show how well he could drawn and compose his panels.

And here are some of those newspaper clippings I mentioned.