Mix and Match

Saturday Leftover Day

I never scanned Big Ben Bolt from my many newspaper sections when two things happened. Classic Comic Press came out with a book of the first two years of the dailies and I absolutely loved it. I knew the drawing style of John Cullen Murphy was very well, but the storylines were suprisingly good. The whole premise of a boxer trying as a sort of social warrior just works. And it often is a bit messy, certainly for it's time period. The second thing was I got a load of fifties scans from my Dutch co-collector friend Arnaud. I started scanning everything I had for him and keeping them together with his, in the hope one day I would have enough to present whole storylines (which were seperate on the Sundays, so that would work).

But how to present them? As all collectors know Sunday newspaper strips are usually designed to be cut up in various different ways. There is the half page version with three tiers, the classic two tier version made by dropping the first tier and the four tier tab version, usually made by either dropping one small panel on the last place of the half page's first tier (Willy Lumpkin) or the middle panel of the half page second tier (Pogo).

I haven't got an actual sample for Pogo, but you can work it out from this:

But Big Ben Bolt addded a new version. Apart from the half page and the truncated two tier versions, there also was a slightly smaller two tier version that rearranged most panels from the half page and added a bit of drawing to them. I have never seen a tab version, but the panels in this alternative two tier are to elongated to fit into taht (if there ever was one), so the extra drawing must have been especially for this version only. Sinde I have many samples of both versions, I decided to see if I could fit them together in some format and here is the result (with the two seperate scans underneath).

So now I think I will have to do them all that way.