What to pick for my saturday representation. I have been busy scanning and have quite a nice backlog.How about a selection of one of Burne Hogarth's most forgotten strips? In the late forties, after dowing Tarzan and before doing Tarzan, Nurne Hogarth created two new strips. When he left Tarzan in 1945, due to a dispute with his syndicate, he tried and action-adventure strip of his own, called Drago, about a young Argentine nobleman battling post war Nazis in South America. Not a succes, but that may have been due to the lack of muscle his new syndicate (Robert Hall) had. He returned to Tarzan and at the same time launched a new, comical strip. Miricale Jones is best know for supposedly featuring the first work of Bernie Krigstein, as one of his assistants. Hogarth tought at the Cartoonists and Illustrators School (later the School of Visual Arts) in New York. One of his students was Al Williamson and I reckon I see some of his style in the shape of some of the panels here. Was that in influence on Williamson, or did Williamson assist Hogarth. I don't think the latter is possible timewise.
I never had seen much of these Sundy only strip, except for a couple of black and white illustrations (and even a reprint in muddy greys), so I jumped at the opportunity when these came up on eBay. I had not seen half of them were in French from a Canadian paper, but the pictures are just as nice (and I can read French). The colors are a bit less vibrant, which is partly due to the fact that the Canadian tearsheets have browned more, but possibly also because the printing was less. It is something I have seen before on other strips, with one paper even dropping one of the three main colors. I have also include one page both in French and as an American three tier with the bottom of the panels dropped. That must have been one of the official versions offered, but boy, does it look ugly.
