As I have said again an again, the newspaper comics of the fifties were far from the wasteland they have been made out to be by lazy comic book and strip historians. Especially in the late fifties, many effots were made to reintroduce the greatness of the strips from previous decades. The still going Prince Valiant was a huge influence of course, justifying a whole genre of illustrated strips with dialoge not in the balloons but in blocks of text underneath the images. Frank Giacoia's Johnny Reb was a prime example of this and I hope one day to be able to present the whole strip here. I have shown a lot it's three years here, but recently I came across another set of tear sheets which I am sharing here. Some of these strips I have shown before, others not (or only in black and white). I will go back and add the new ones to the longer 'complete' runs of my earlier posts. But for now you can just enjoy them here. Althiough he has the reputation of never doing any work without uncredited assistance from his 'frirnds' (such as Gil Kane, Mike Sekowsky and Carmine Infantino), the earliest ones have all the marks of Giacoia doing them himself. But there are some by Jack Kirby as well.
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