Saturday, October 20, 2018

The Mild Mild West

Saturday Story Strip Day.

Regular visitors to my blog will know, that I am a sucker for the unknown and the obscure. That doesn not mean I don't like the big succesful comics or strips. I like Warren Tufts' strips Casey Ruggles and Lance and will buy both collections coming from Classic Comic Press. But I won't show them here, because of that same reason. If you like it as well, you can go and buy the book (And while you are there, look for their other great books as well: https://www.classiccomicspress.com/products/lance). Recently, I sold a lot of newspaper sections with Casey Ruggles in them, but what I scanned weren't those pages, but the few I had from 1955, when Tufts had left the strip and the syndicate continued it with another artist. Wikipedia says it's Al Carreno, but I am not familiar with his work enough to say if he did these. Not as good as those done by Tufts by a long shot, but I guess you have never seen them anywhere. With that I have an earlier ghosted Sunday, from a half year period in 1953 when Tufts didn't do Casey Ruggles. The best guess seems to be Al Plastino, but I have to confess to seeing some Bob Powell in there as well. Then again, maybe not enough to say it is by Powell (who had a very distinct style). Little else to add, except maybe that the sections with Tufts sold out immediately. The ones with these strips (and Tarzan on the back) did not.



2 comments:

Unknown said...

Thanks, Ger. These satisfy a curiosity about Ruffles after Tufts. The artist has a nice grotesque style but it becomes a completely different strip. Keep up the good work.

Barry said...

Thanks for these. I do enjoy the art - yes, different in feel and tone from the Tufts run, but I think the syndicate did learn from Tufts hiatus from the Sunday in the Fall of 1953 - these are better than that period of the strip.