Go-go Strips

Saturday Leftover Day.

In my new book Behaving Madly (about the Mad magazines imitators of the late fifties, click on the Amazon button on the right to preorder your copy) I was not able to use any material from Sick due to copyright reasons. Which I idn't mindm because it gave me lots of room to show other stuff. The only bad thing about it, is robed me of a chance to highlite the later career of Bob Powell, who work for Sick for the last seven years of his life. After his death, Powell was accused of having no sense of humor by isonce pupil.studio mate Howard Nostrand and the huge body of work proves him wrong. Powell had an acute, if very sharp sense of humor. In fact, I was able to show some of it in my book, because he developed his satirical style on magaziens such as Panic, before going to Sick. But does that mean that Powell was a harsh or mean man. I think it proves he was a realist rather than a clown or fantasist. His mean contribution to any of his work from the forties onward is that he aded a level of realism and believabillity to the situation. Never more so than in his last and most important post Sick production, the shortlive newspaper strip Teena-a-go-go. Created together with Teen Life editor Betsy Little, he created a special girls strip for her magazine, which they later soold als a Sunday and daily strip as well. GHaving shown some of the Sundays, I never knew there was a daily version as well, until I ran across these micro-fiche sampels. Is there anyone out there who saved all three months of this strip?

Teen Powell

Friday Comic Book Day.

For most of the sixties Bob Powell had disappeared into his work for Sick (with a few small sidesteps as a magazine illustrator). I have written an article for Alter Ego about his last few years as an active artist which I hope oy Thomas will soon be able to publish (but I have written more than one article for him, at least one of which will come sooner). When Sick crimbled in the mid-sixties (and before he was diagnozed with cander) he had to go out and look for new accounts. One of these was with the youth magazine Teen Life, where former Miss America editor Bessy Little was in charge. She hired him to illustrate a teen strip called Teena-a-gogo, which soon was turned into a newspaper strips as well. Though shortrun, I have ben able to show a lot of those (though sadly not all the Sunday pages, which I am still looking for). Before that he did a couple of one-off strips for Teen Life. Maybe these were his first work for the magazine. Anyway, if we can classify hs later worked as mostly forgotten, strips like this are firtually unknown.

Clean Teens

Thursday Story Strip Day.

In 1967 Bob Powell dies after a long and succesful career in comics, which strted with Will Eisner in the late thirties and included his own studio in the late forties and early sixties and numerous very destinctly draw comics for many companies, including Harvey and Atlas. A true master of the form, he seems to have disappeared from comics after the late fifties, first taking over the Bat Masterton newspaper strip from Howard Nostrand (which I have shown here) and then settling in as one of the resident artists of the satirical magazine Sick (when it was tryong not to be a Mad imitation). For some reason these last years of his career have remained mostly unknown among fans. After Sick was bought by a new owner and decided to become more and more like a cheap knockoff of Mad, Powell left and went back to comics. he drew an issue of Archie's Madhouse and strated newspaper strip and monthly comic strip serial with teen magazine editor Bessy Little called Teena-A-Go-Go. From what I have seen it was as beautifully drawn as anything Powell did and even though it was not a succes, I am sure Powell would have gone on to greater heights and have been remembered better had he not died of cancer. I have never heard of anyone who had a complete set of Sundays and dailies of Teena, but last month I did come across a complete online set of the daily episodes of the whole of Teena's half year of existance... well, almost. Coevering the whole period, the set I came across only had the Saturday edition of that particular paper. I found another paper carrying the strip, but there also a large portion of the dailies was not represented. Still, together with the Sundays I showed earlier, they do give a good impression of this unjustly forgotten teen soaper.