After his daily cartoon series Tall Tales was discontinued in 1964, Al Jaffe tried hard to sel a new strip. In fact, he once told me in an email that he made about two ideas a month, which still should be 'in the attic at my son's place'. In 1966 he hit paydirt with a soap opera strip for Frank Bolle. This may seem a strange sidestep for the cartoonist and satarist, who had also started working at Mad by that time. But in fact he had written (and drawn) the teen-age romance stories for Patsy Walker between 1945 and 1955, so it was a genre he could work with. These scans have been laying around in my clipped strips for a long time beacuse they are a bit to small to read properly. I wasn't until I got a color Sunday sample that I dared to iclude them here. A rarity, but it ran for two years.
5 comments:
You really stumped today on Debbie Deere. I remember it not at all. It do not believe that it appeared in either of the two major Los Angeles dailies of the period, the Times or the Herald-Examiner, both of which I read.
Any idea who the Sunday artist (ghost/assistant) was?
I can see a lot of not-Frank Bolle art in the Sundays.
He shows up in Debbie's face and other faces,
but it looks like he had someone helping him on Sundays.
And, you know, he signed everything when possible,
even sneaking his FWB initials into comic books without credits.
But no signature on the Sundays.
D.D.Degg
I don't know D. All I have in my mind for Bolle is 'bland' and this certainly qualifies. Then again, at this time in the sixties there were many artist working in this style, just look at all those 'horror' books from Dell.
Bolle seemed to find a niche in soap strips - he has the distinction of being the last artist on Winnie Winkle, Juliet Jones, and Apartment 3-G (the latter was put out of its misery last year, after the art was allowed to deteriorate in its final year or two).
I was reading these strips as a kid. It was 15-20 years after their initial publication. I was young enough to benefit from them. Wonderful that you've posted them on the anniversary of their original appearance (fifty years, to the day!).
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