Saturday, December 04, 2021

Terry And The Cowboys

Saturday Leftover Day. 

I ama bog fan of Ray Bailey, who worked as an assistant to Milt Caniff in the early forties and went on to do two daily and Sunday newspaper strips of his own; Bruce Gentry in 1945-1950 and Tom Corbett in the early fifties. After that he returned to Caniff (in a way) by becoming the main artist on Dell's Steve Canyon comic book series (it is rumored Caniff still did the heads himself, although it is clear Bailey could do those as well). What I didn't kno, is that he did a lot more at Dell (and later WEstern), who remained his main emplyer well into the sixties, working for such titles as Turok and Boris Karloff Mysteries. I am going to get as many of those pages and stories as possible. Here is one of the earliest, a nice little western he did in 1957. In fact, he contributed two stories to this issue (the last of the series) with John Buscema doing the third. This is the second one, which I found the most impressive of the two. It was another return for Bailey, who had done a Sunday only called Vesta West for the Chicago Tribune syndicate's Comic Book in 1943, while still working for Caniff.

2 comments:

Stefan said...

Nice! I had thought Bailey had dropped out of the business entirely at this point. Would love to see more

Ger Apeldoorn said...

I was as surprised as you. I have been gathering them and will take one out of the bag every pnce in a while. Not only Boris Karloff, but also Turok, some westerns and more.