I recently got a set of assorted newspaper strips from a friendly collector in an easy trade. They included some of my favorite lesser known strips, although none of them in complete runs. In fact, most of them were scattered among several time periods. Still, some were so rare, that I scanned and cleaned them anyway, to show here.
This is an inclomplete run of Frank Thorne's Dr. Guy Bennett. He started out in the late forties doing romance comcis for Standard. In the early fifties worked on the Perry Mason Sunday only newspaper strip for King Featuress. I have shown several of these on my blog. At that ooint in his career he worked in an imitation of Alex Raymond's style, which he kept up through the fifties, doing comi book versions of Flash Gordon and Jungle Jim for Dell (among others). In 1957 he took over Dr. Guy Bennett and kept it going to 1963. Not the best written series, this doctor soap showed his great skill in drawing both peple and action an dit is where he developed his own style. In this style he also started working for DC which is how his second and better known career in comics started.
I have shown many episodes of Dr. Guy Bennett before, but always from microfiche sources. That is not the best quality anyway, but in case of Thorone and his often fine lined artwork it was extra damaging. When I started scanning the actual dailies I was immediately struck by the quality of the drawing. I hope this survives in my post. I have also scanned and shown a couple of Sundays, but it seems to me they were more dull and static than the dailies. I can have been my few samples, but I get the impression that Thorne worked best when he didn't draw for color.
By the way, I put the fragments in the right order, but I don't really understand how the seperate storylines were running seperately. It seems that the later storyline started somewhere when the first two were still runing. Very confusing.
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