A couple of weeks ago, I shared some weeks of daily strips from the early fifties western strip Hopalong Cassidy by Dan Spiegle. Coincidentally I was going through my set of Phladelphia Bulletin Fun Books and found that they had pages of dailies of this strip as well. Except that they were a couple of years ealrier and in color. So I pulled them up from my raw scan files, added some more Sundays I had not done yet and cleaned the whole thing up.
The Fun Books are up at eBay for a rediculously low price and I recemmoned them for all sorts of collectors. They were an extra 8 page Sunday section for the kids, which was edited by later Family Circle's Bill Keane. He also did Channel Chuckles, which I have shown here a lot. In the forties he worked on the Philadelphia Bulletin, producing thos section, which apart from the occasional cover, also contained his first strip Silly Philly and the punfilled Myrth Quackers. There are several features in Fun Book, from which I particulary like Play Detective and Pic Trix. Pic Trix was a sort of inverted version of Al Jaffee's later fold-in, where you had to fold in parts of the panel to create new images. I was done by Morrie Brickman, who later gained fame with The Small Society. He is not related to Annie Hall co-writer Marshall Brickman, but his son Paul Brickman did write and direct Risky Business.
Serious comic strip fans will like these section for the large tabloid pages of Mandrake and later Hopalong Cassidy. If you are really lucky, you will find one with The Spirit, since it was used as a foldarund for Will Eisner's weekly stories. For some of the Fun Books on my blog you can also follow the link.
