Friday Comic Book Day.
Still looking for Maurice de Bevere's comic book work from his stay in New York in the late forties. In an early interview with the Lucky Luke creator in Les Cahier des Bandes Dessinees, "Morris' (as he is known and famous in Europe) told that he did indeed stay in New York for six years. I had previously suggested that he must have returned home betwen his know stay in the late forties and his published children's book (in the Owl Book series) in 1954, but apparently he remained in new York even after his friends had left for Europe and continued drawing Lucky Luke for Spirou by mail (often drawing on two sides of the page to save postage). I always quoted his family from a later interview saying he was asked by Harvey Kurtzman (whom he met and befriended) to join him in Mad. In this earlier interview he says he was asked to joing him in anotehr new adventure, a magazine of war stories. This can only have been either Two Fisted Tales or Frontline Combat. De Bevere didn't join, because he felt it was not his genre. He also mentiones to have been there at the creation of Mad a year later, was nothing about nbeing asked to join that. Of course, he does repeat the quote from the other interview, that he worked in comics off and on during those years, but he doesn't mention if he did so in a cartoon style (like Lucky Luke) or in a realistic style. If it was the latter, recognizing it will be hard.
Still, I am goinf through as many cowboy books as I can and that is how I came across this little gem, a comedy filler by Dave Berg, very much in the style of Kurtzman's Potshot Pete (for Toby) and the unsold one-pager by Bill Elder shown in the Chicken Fat book compiled from odds and ends of his files by his son in law Gary Vandenberg.
Apart from that there were interesting pages from Joe Maneely and Gene Colan in the same books.
