Art Comparison

Sunday Corrective Measures.

Having shown almost all Mort Meskin pages on Sundays here, when someone online suggested they had found another unknown Meskin story in Standard's Gangworld #5, I had to have a look. At first I agreed, but taking a second look I thought it may be Bernard Baily imitating Meskin's line. It is a hard destinction to make. A couple of years ago, I almost bought an original Meskin page from Heritage, which turned out to be Bailey as well (after I lost the bid). On The Digital Comics Museum and the Grand Comic Book Base, they follow Jim Vadeboncoeur's lead and say it's Jerry Grandenetti. That could be true as well, as Grandenetti at that time could look like anyone.

Put That In Your Pipe

Saturday Leftover Day.

Plenty more newspaper strip ads to go. Some of these are from newspaper sections I am currently selling on eBay. Look for my name 'geapelde'.

Camels was one of the longest running series of newspaper ads in the forties and fifties. They are now often accused of trying to sell cigarettes to kids, but that is based on the popular misunderstanding that a. comics are for kids and b. newspaper comics are for kids. That is not the case, certainly not in the forties and fifties. And these ads are not made to appeal to kids, they are for the whole family. So the tabacco industry did ads to sell cigarettes to the whole family. Which is bad enough.

As a contrast, here is a cigarette ad (and character) that was aimed at kids. He even got a comic book of his own.

And here is one that sort of sits in between. The art probably is by kids and teenage comic artist Bill Williams.

Here's one where they shamelessly tried to get kids to smoke pipe tabacco.

And since I seem to be doing cigarettes today, here are two more ads of one of the best series ever, by Lou Fine. Look out, though. They are numbered, so very addictive for collectors like me. I have about 60% of them and won't stop until I have them all.

A Real Life Hero

Sunday Toth Treasures.

Here is the remainder of Alex Toth's short stories for Eastern Comics' New Heroic. Toth started his career with Eastern but kept on doing stories for them until DC offered him enough to fill his time.

Hawaian Saturdays

Saturday Leftover Day.

I have been looking forward to posting this. I have been sold a lot of Sunday newspaper sections from the Honolulu Star Bulletin form the fifties. It wasn;t actually a Sunday, but came with the Saturday paper. In 1956 thye had a period where the Saturday daily strips were included in the Sunday section and I scanned all four of them. To make them readable here I cut them into four parts. Lots of interesting strips. Why they chose to have the title in the bottom of the first panel, when almost every strip leaves some room for that in te top, I don't understand.What are your favorites?