Paul Norris artistic development was a strange one. He started in the early forties as a Caniff imitator as the third artist on Vic Jordan. In the late forties he worked for King Features, illustrating their weekly serials as well as taking over the Jungle Jim Sunday. In the latter particulary, he tried to imitate Ales Raymond's style, but he added more and more Caniff touches as he went along. By the time he took over the daily and Sunday Brick Bradford, he had found his own synthesis, which he kept going for many years. After that he worked on several King Features comic books, including Flash Gordon, where you see his own style falling to the background again. Here are some samples of all of his periods, brought togetehr because I had two color Brick Bradford Sundays.
2 comments:
The last sample (from an original artwork) has a totally different format from how I remember the Sundays. Was it drawn as a half-page three tier set of panels and later re-arrenged to a vertical format? I can't see if the original art sample is also from the 50s.
I'll always remember Paul Norris for Brick Bradford, although he didn't create the strip. When he died it was mentioned he drew the Aquaman comic and no mention on his many newspaper strips.
The original unfortunately is too small to see the date, but with the trend being that the formats went from large to small I would say it is earlier than my 1959 color samples. As fatr as I can see it, it can be turned into a four tier tabloid page only if the second panel is used as the first tier and the third panel either enlarged or replaced by a new and larger one. I know some comic historian find aything to do with superheroes more important than anything else, but the fact that he originated Aquaman doesn't mean anything to me. Than again, we didn't have the succesful cartoon series that ruined DC's chances at the box office (why else would there be a Green Lantern movie).
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