Saturday, May 18, 2019

Spoogy

Saturday Leftover Day.

Coogy is one of my altime favorite strips from the early fifties. It was drawn and written by Ir Spector for the Haerald Tribune and a stand alone Sunday only. The first year it was done as a one tier color strip, but after that it continued as a full half page strip until wlel into 1954. I came across a couple of samples of this are strip, which was not distributed outside of the Herald Tribune. It's fun, it's satirical and yes, it resembles Pogo - but it has a charm all of it's own. Later in the run, Spector even took on a couple of larger literary targets nd did four week parodies of The Old Man and The See, Mary WOrth and George Bernard Shaw. I have shown quite a few of these, but I never could get hold of a longer run - until I was at the Billy ireland Museum in 2017. They had two bound newspaper volumes from Bill Blackbeard's collection, which had two complete years. I photographed all of them (as well as some other stuff), but when I got home I was sad to see that the resolution wasn't as good as I had hoped and the bound newspapers had made all my samples wavey. Here are two of them corrected as much as I could. What do you think, should I continue until I have done everything from those two years?

4 comments:

Diego Cordoba said...

Frankly, no. The text and images are blurry, especially the text were the paper is warped is almost unreadable. It was fun discovering this, but the quality is on par with the microfiches, that are unreadable.

If, however, there are fans of this strip out there…but really my eyes got watery trying to read this.

Ger Apeldoorn said...

Which is how I felt. I am glad to have them, but they are nowhere near the real thing.

comicstripfan said...

Ger: this is a very interesting strip - and maybe my reader is working better than some others, but your samples in my view seem fairly clear, even as to the small-printed narration, which must have been hard to read in some printed copies of the original newspaper - excellent restoration work - my vote? (selfishly perhaps I ask because most of us can't make it to the Billy Ireland Museum)-please continue!

Ger Apeldoorn said...

I will not put it on the top of the pile, but I may get back to it. Or to some of the others I photographed: Jeanie by Gill Fox, Sherlock Holmes and The Saint. In the meanwhile I'll keep lobbying for a book collection.