Right Around The Family

Tuesday Comic Strip Day.

For most his career, Colin Allen was earning his living as a cartoonist fir all the mainstream magazines and doing illustrations for Sunday weekly magazines such as the Pictorial Review and American Weekly. As such, he is a mainstream artist that I usually skip when scanning. But from 1946 to 1954 he did a Sunday only newspaper feature that is quite a lot of fun. What A Family! was clearly a take-off of Right Around The Corner, which originated the idea of having a huge tableau of the same family, everyone doing their own thing and having their own comments on the subject of the week. Like What A Family!, Right Around Home had two panels, only in the latter case they were devided by a diagonal border. What A Family! benifits from Allen's obvious superiority as a cartoonist, though. If he had been first, this funny and colorful feature could have been big.

Right Around The What?

Tuesday Comic Strip Extra.

As an addition to yesterday's set of cartoons, here is some more of Colin Allen's work. He may have been the most succesfull of the lot, with a regular job as an illustrator for King Features Sunday magazine Pictorial Review and a whole page Sunday strip/cartoon called 'The Looneys... What A Family!', that ran through King Features Syndicate from September 1946 to October 1954. I have several samples, but seem to have scanned only one. It is of course remarkably similar to the much more succesful Right Around Home, which was also distributed by King Features and ran from 1937 to 1964. I guess they made their own competition before anyone else did it.