For today I prepared a special one-off. In the past I have showed here a lot of Sundays from Stan Drake's Juliet Jones as well as many of the side projects he did (mainly before) his seminal soap opera strip. Drake started out at Johnstone and Cushing (well, he did some work before that, including some illustration work in the war which I have somewhere but can't find anymore), developing his own version of the photo realistic 'advertising style'.
After that, it was always assumed that he went on directly to Juliet Jones, when King Features head Syvan Beck and writer Margeret Mitchell (trying to develop a soap opera strip) discovered him at the same time in advertising. But as I showed here in an earlier post, he was also doing illustrations for a serialized soap opera series in King Features' Pictorial Review supplement - a much more likely lead-in to Juliet Jones. Well, it turns out he also did illustration work for other magazines, most notably Bluebook. Bluebook was a monthly adventure story magazine, which appeared alongside the much more popular and better known Redbook. Copies of this early fifties magazine are not easy (or cheaply) to come by, but I have two in my collection.
So today I went and cleaned up scans from the stories Drake illustrated in the January and December issues.
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