Jack Jack

Sunday Surprise Day. A double surprise today, since I have not only prepared a rare Jack Davis strip for you, but I have also scanned and cleaned a couple more Sesame Street Sundays an dadded them to last weeks post. Have a look once you are done with this. Mad, movieposter and EC favorite Jack Davis did a lot of work druing and inbetween his most famous jobs. Some of those you will find in my book Behaving Madly, which is shown to the right. If you buy it through this link I will get an extra 3 cents or so. And hurry, I am told it is almost sold out. It has several Jack Davis contribution from the Mad magazine imitations of the late fifties, where he was a frequent traveler. Most of the time he was allowed to do his own thing, that's how glad they were to even have him. Most collectors will know Jack Davis also did two issues of his own Mad imitation in comic book format for Dell. Yak-Yak was filled with gags and parodies, even some formats ripped of from his work on Harvey Kurtzman's Humbug. I have the idea that most which was not wrtten by Davis himself was by Jack Mendelsohn, but I have forgotten where I read that. I am sure that you can find some of those stories online and I will upload my own scans to the Digital Comicbok Database as soon as I am done scanning of of the Mad comci book imitatons to sell them on Ebay. But there was one more story for Dell, most collectors are not aware of. For a long time it was thought to be some sort of inventory material from Yak-Yak. But now that I finally have a copy of The Modniks #2 with the Jack Davis filler story, I am doubtful. It seems slightly later in style and the humor isn't as sharp as the stuff he did for Yak-Yak. Anyway, it has Davis effortless humor and I am sure you will appreciate it.

End Of The Run

Saturday Story Strip Day.

So there it is. The end of my run of The Saint Sunday strips, drawn by Mike Roy with assistance by Jack Davis. Actually, I think he had left Roy's employ somewehre towards the end. The last Sunday certainly isn't his and I also have my doubts about the two before that. But what a run it was. Next week... Frank Thorne!

Working In The Art Mines

Saturday Story Strip Day.

More of Jack Davis assisting on Mike Roy's The Saint. What a marvelous run - and it is only getting better! In this run I see many faces that look more like Davis' later EC work than Mike Roy's various comic book and newspaper strip projects. Then again, he was probably wokring with other inkers and pencillers then. Follow the link to see for yourself.

Davis Visuals

Saturday Story Strip Day.

As defined last week, we are well into 'clearly by Jack Davis' territory here. Of course I do not now how much Davis learned from Mike Roy, but I see several of his faces, some of his inking style and more. MY guess is that Roy did the at that time normal sparse lay-outs and let his inker/background man do the rest.

Detective At Work

Saturday Story Strip Day.

More of the Saint. As I have said before, I am sharing this large run of The Saint Sundays by Mike Roy, because somewhere in 1950 he hired a young Jack Davis as an assistant. Jack Davis has said that he was asked to do backgrounds, but at a certain point it seems he was doing pencils and inks as well. But when did he start and can we see?

As far as I am concerned, there are three points of recognition. From back to front there are:

- the first point where you say: this is certainly Jack Davis
- the first point where you say: this is likely to be Jack Davis
- the last point where you say: this is defenitively not Jack Davis

In this lot we see the Sunday that is my first point of defenitively Jack Davis: the Sunday for June 11. That is not to say that there are no hints of him before that, but to my eyes it is the first one I am absolutely sure about. From there we can go backwards.

The Roy And I

Saturday Story Strip Day.

I could not go upstairs to correct some more pages, because of the current heatwave here in Holland (and the rest of Europe). Today it was a bit cooler., so I prepared the next installment of the Saint series I am running. Apart from the fact that it is beautiful to look at and not a bad read, I hope we will be able to see when Jack Davis arrived and started as Mike Roy's assistant.