I think this is pretty special. I have quite long runs of Jack Sparling's two forties newspaper strips, Hap Hopper and Calaire Voyant. I will be sharing them here in portions, hopefully a couple of months every week (they are mostly scanned, but cleaning them does take some time). What I find remarkable about these strips is that they are of a pretty high quality even though a. they are not often mentioned in comic strip histories and b. Jack Sparling went on to a prolific but never exciting career as comic strip artist with minor publishers. I caan't help but wonder that with some help and a good writer he would have gotten a lot further. I will also be showing some of his illustration work from the fifties, which shows the same blend of humor and realistic drawing.
Hap Hopper was supposely written by the political journalist duo of Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen, but the daily storylines at least were ghostwritten. If the Sunday were, I don't know. They feature single gags, that may or may not have come from the duo's own experience. Odd to have a gag strip with such realistic art. In that respect only Will Eisner seems like a compatriot of Sparling and although he never worked for Eisner, he does seem to have been aware of him (especially on the later Claire Voyant).
I hope you'll like and and will come back for more.
1 comment:
Thanks so much for posting these interesting but somewhat obscure strips. The fact is, even if most people had lived during the times they appeared, they would not have had a chance to see them, since most newspapers would have only had room for the more popular strips.
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