Showing posts with label Christmas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Christmas. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 03, 2019

Monday Originals Day.

Serving up an illustrated children's serial for Christmas is an old newspaper tradition. I have shown stories from the late thirties and early forties illustrated by Noel Sickles and Hank Barrow. Years ago I clipped these samples of a later story illustrated by Dick Hodgins Jr., who went on to ghost the Hank Ketcham signed sailor strip Half-Hitch and inking and other jobs for various Mort Walker and Dik Browne strips. Alongside these he was often seen doing political cartoons (back when they often were not as partisan as these days). I have forgotten to post them many years in a row, so now I am doing them early.




Friday, November 25, 2016

How Did We Get Here?

Saturday Leftover Day.

I just remembered I have been saving this Thanksgiving strip for more than a year now (having forgotten to use it last year). It's by Walt Scott, a Associated Press staff artist who did a lot of special illustration series, christmas strips, political cartoons and other stuff, before taking over the Captain Easy Sunday strip in the late forties and into the early fifties and launching his own strip The Little People on the coattails of that. Scott was a very stylized artist, whose sometimes stiff artwork worked best for me in his political cartoons, he also could draw pretty women quite well, but he only got to se those in Captain Easy. And comic history (and histrians) have not been kind to him about that. Coming after Roy Crane and while Leslie Turner was doig the daily can't have helped. But as I say, his women are quire nice and as a stylized artist, his designs (and especially his colors) are always interesting. All this fell into it's place when he started doing Little People - but there the subject and the lack of humor was always a turn-off for me. One of the best things he did in my eye was the Christmas Carol adaptation he did as a Christmas strip like this one. I have shown it before, but I may repeat it this Christmas. It is similar to this one, but I likeit just a little bit better.

Enjoy the weekend, my American friends. In spite of everything.