Friday, March 18, 2022

Bait and Switch

 Saturday Leftover Day.

A while back I showed a couple of strips at the end of their run. I like those sad endings, especially if the artist or writer saw them coming and able to refer to the ending in the story - or at least hint to it. Around the same time I started looking at the moment when Creig Flessel took over from Win Mortimer on David Crane. Crane was written by Mark Trail's Carl Dodd, so he was not able to do a lot by way of goodby. Luckily Dodd did it for him.

The switch here starts at the end of a storyline, so it must have been planned. As you would expect in that case, the switch in the Sunday page starts three weeks earlier. In a remarkable act of cooperation, the paper ever acknowledges the switch by the second installment by Addin Fleissel's name in the credit line. The first Sunday is unsigned, but the church lady in the thord panel looks distinctly like Fleissel's work. The rest doens't really, so it may also be a case of Fleissel inking Mortimer's pencils.

But that is not all of the story. Ten years later, Fleissel left the strip to work for Playboy (what a switch). A new artist replaced him, or not really a new one... you will see in next week's Saturday episode of this blog.


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