Jazz Lines

Saturday Mexican Day. I cleaned up a few more Gordo Sundays. I have shown some earlier and they are among my most copied scans. And actually, they are the reason that I have started adding a light copyright line to my scans. Oddly, book containing Gordo are not selling well. Maybe because they have not been in color? Or maybe Gordo works best as a one off illustration? I just like them regardless.

 

Laughing Out Not So Loud

Thursday Extra Day. 

 

 Bil Keane will always be best known for his saccharine family series The Family Circus. Especially the many Snday he did with the kid who blames a ghost, or the stippled line that show how one of the other kids took the long route from a to b. My personal favorite has always been his Channel Chuckles gag panel (daily and Sunday) that ran from long before The Circus was born until deep into it's run. But when exactly did it start? Today I went back and had a look. It seems Channel Chuckles was an immediate hit, probably due to the fact that it's onr column format was especiall made for use on the otherwise dull tv listing page. I narrowed my search to California papers and found six who started it from the beginning, february 15, 1954. The first three weeks are numbered, altough not every paper used them in the same order.

 

I Read It In A Book

Sunday Something Seuss Day. New magazines keep being added to the already substantial amount of downloadable material on The Internet Archive. Hey, even this blog is preserved on the Wayback Machine. But also scores of magazine form the forties and fifties, that allow me to look for my favorite cartoonists and illustrators. Here is a selection of short stories Dr. Seuss did for Redbook magazine (which had started as a magazine of adventurous historical stories, but by 1954 had become just another family magazine). I think all of them were reused in one of Dr. Suess' collections of short stories. But the art is sometimes different.

Fumetti Classico

Sunday Italian Classic Day.

 I am a huge fan and collector of Italian master Jacovitti's very funny comic strips. Apart from creaing characters as Cocco Bill and Zorry Kid and illustrtaing classics such as inocchio and the Kama Sutra, he also drew a lot of absurd cartoons and silent gag strips. Hre are some I have ready for posting (with more from Imagao to come). If you follow the link, you will also find a couple of pages from the Domenica del Correira, which I translated and shared here years ago. Many of those have textless gags, too.

 

Here Comes the Sun

Saturday Leftover Day. 

Clark Haas is best known for producing the animation series Clutch Cargo and Space Angel, famous for two things: using life action mouths to capture the moving lips and using designs and art by Alex Toth. Before that, his work could be seen in various comic book series in the fifties, namely the very good looking Kathy from Standard (which I should show sometime). Before that he did a weekly newspaper strip called Sunny Side. I thought I had more copies, but there's what I cam across this morning.