You'll be glad tomorrow

Wednesday Advertising Day


Up till now I have concentrated on the cartoon comic strip ads, apart from the Eveready ads by Greig Flessel I have been showcasing.Realistically drawn ads were in the majority in the forties and even in the fifties, they made up almost 50% of the ads. The style used for these ads, was the general 'advertising realism' style, that has it's basis in the more realistic work of Alex Raymond. One of the most influential artists in creating this style was Lou Fine. Fine worked for Will Eisner and Quality comics in the early forties and was admired by everyone for his free flowing energy and lyricism. He took the best of Raymond's Flash Gordon and added comic strip storytelling. After influencing everyone (including Will Eisner and Jack Kirby), he slowly reigned in his style, until it had become almost dull and boring in it's realistic depiction of everyday life and people. This style was uniquely suited for advertising soon he became one of the early stars of comic strip ads. Flessel said in one of his interviews that he didn't see Lou Fine a lot at Johnstone and Cushing, because he joined forces with another artist in the late forties. Because I don't know which ads were done by Johnstone and Cuching in a faux Fine style and which were done by Lou Fine himself, it is hard for me to see which ad is done by which artist. At Johnstone and Cushing artists such as Stan Drake and Leonard Starr worked out their own version of that style and seemed to have been very successful at it. Carl Wexler joined in as well, although it seem to me that he came more from the Milton Caniff side of the spectrum. Others used a bit of both.

Just as with the cartoon ads, these things were done in series. I am starting with another Eveready ad, Greig Flessel's long running series of true adventures with batteries. The Nebisco ad that follows it is done in a similar style (but by another artist) and format. This did not turn into a longrunning series.




Another popular way to use comic strips in advertising, is to have celebrity endorsments in cartoon form. I guess, that way thecelebrities could always say: "It wasn't me, it was only a drawing!" These were particulary popular with the sigarette ads. Here are a couple of third tier celebrities doing their comic strip thing...






But Camels were not the only company doing this. Here is a great Lucille Ball ad for Philip Morris. After that another Philip Morris ad, with possibly the worst slogan ever deviced: "tomorrow you'll be glad you smoked Philip Morris today." Yeah, right.




Finally, another very popular series... Mr. Coffee Nerves. In the late thirties and early forties, some the most famous of these were drawn by Milt Caniff and Noel Sickles. But towards the ens of the forties, other artist had taken over. And as we can see from this ad, it wasn't just parents they were adressing anymore.



Imagin, giving your kids a chemical to calm them down so they won't turn into criminals... aren't you glad we don't do that anymore?

I don't usually refer to other blogs (others are better at it than me and more complete), but I have to make a not of the fact that The Fortress of Fortitude has a couple of Basil Wolverton's Culture Corner strips. I love these but would never buy whole issues of Captain Marvel to get them. Apparently there are about fifty... seems like enough for a nice book to me.

The Browne and Walker Show

Tuesday comic strip day.

Today a couple more Hi and Lois strips from the late fifties. I recently read somewhere that Fantagraphics is doing a complete edition of Mort Walker's early sixties Sam's strip, one of the weirdest self referential strips ever done for major syndication. I won't be buying it because it has been reprinted here and there several times (including once in a dutch magazine, so I have a complete set). But I urge you all to check it out. I hope that it will be a great success, just as the Complete Beetle Bailey, out soon from Checker. For now Fantagraphics seems to have had more success in getting such books into the general book stores, where they belong. I hope Checker manages to do the same and the success of this series leads to a reprinting of Mort Walker's other strip Hi and Lois. As I said before, I believe it is gorgeous and the humor far ahead of it's times. I liked it better when it was more than just a family strip, though. In the syndication brochure it was called a satire of modern urban life and that is what I like about it. Check out these samples.

I am starting with an early daily strip. My earliest Sunday is from 1857, but the strip ran from 1954 with a Sunday starting in 1956. As you can see from this daily, after two years Dik Brown'e own angular style had complete given way to Mort Walker's more rounded forms. This golf joke would have worked just as well with Beetle Bailey, which probably explains why the dumb character didn't last long.

The Perfect Ketch

Monday cartoon day.

Hank Ketcham did not only do cartoons for The Saturday Evening Post, he also illustrated two of their regular articles. These two series 'You Be The Judge' and "The Perfect Squelch' both ran for many years, using reader's contributions. Many artists illustrated them. Sometimes it was used to give their regulars a bit of extra work, sometimes to break in new talent. Ketcham had a solid run on both. It seems to me that Ketcham did more of them when Dennis the Menace had started, maybe because the editors thought it was a good way to have Ketcham in their magazine even when he didn't have the time to create new cartoon gags.

For The Perfect Squelch readers could submit stories about people who had a good comeback. It was then written up, usually to long to carry the feeble gag at the end. The illustration often was the best thing about it. Here are some by Ketcham, which show how good an illustrator he was.





You Be The Judge featured real court cases, leaving it to the reader to judge for themselves. These are a bit more entertaining on their own, so I have left the text part on. Seems like the sort of stuff television writers use to fill their C-plots.

Ketcham Sketcham.

Sunday leftovers.

I started the week with a couple of Hnk Ketcham cartoons from 1948 and 1949. Also from 1949 is this illustrated article from the Saturday Evening Post.

King Kent

Saturday leftover day.

This week, John K. showed some pictures of 1950's puppets, including on that looked remarkably like the comic strip character King Aroo. King Aroo was created by Jack Kent in the early fifties. At first it was widely syndicated, but after five years it is supposed to have been withdrawn from syndication and continued just for one paper for another ten years. Funny enough, I have come across many samples of this strip from every period. Maybe it's just that I have long runs of the right papers. Anyway, I had decided to wait with showing you this strip, because it is quite well known among cartoonists, even though it has never been collected. There was a good representation of the strip with a great article in Nemo, the comic strip magazine from the eighties and nineties. If you come across issues of this old forerunner of Hogan's Alley, I can highly recommend it.

Anyway, John's mention of the strip did prompt me to go an have a look what I have scanned in from it. These are some of my oldest scans, dating from four years back. In the future I intend to show you a larger sampling of this cute strip, maybe even a longer run as I have so many. I have also included a daily sample, as I find that this strip works better in the daily than the Sunday. For some reason, in the Sunday it only proves that it is not in the same league as it's two inspirators, Pogo and Krazy Kat.

Still, there's a lot to enjoy from a cartooning point of view.

Special olympics.

Friday comic book day.

Just like last week, I am using the Friday to prepare you for a longer post about Irv Spector. In late 1945 he and Harvey Kurtzman and a couple of other artists were probably asked by Stan Lee to come up with new features. Kurtzman responded with Hey Look and the short-lived Pig Tales. Irv Spector produced several stories of Little Lionel, a cartoon bear who liked sports. When I first came across these stories, I thought they could be by Kurtzman, because they were so different from the regular features in the Timely animal humor line... but it turns out they are by Spector, a former (and future) animator, who created a lovely and lively character and seemed to have a lot of fun with the mostly silent stories. This is the third stoy in my collection. There are at least two more out there, as you can see for yourself if you go to the excellent Atlas Tales website, the place on the web where you can find all information about the unknown years of Martin Goodman's comic book empire, which was run for many years by Stan Lee, before it almost collapsed and finally was turned into what we now know as Marvel.

I have added a Hey Look page as well. If you are in any way interested in Kurtzman or these strips, you should try to find the complete collection of Hey Look strips that was done ain 1991 by Kitchen Sink. If you already have it, here's one in color.










John Krixfalusi expended on this post, by doing a graphic analysis of this story. Go to his blog to look for it.

Bless Jeanie

Thursday story day.

For some reason this weeks installment of my representation of Fox's Jeanie originals is not as complete as the others. In the second half, I am missing a couple of dailies. After that it will pick up for a while, though.

For those of you who have rved about Fox's Bless, the Mayopr over at John Kricfalusi's blog, I have pulled another sample from Allan Holts' presentation over at the Stripper's Guide a year ago. There were eleven of these and as I have said, I think it is too bad Allan didn't just show them all. If the person who bought the whole run of Family Comics from Allan isn reading this, maybe we can arrange something.

As far as I can see, Fox is going for a All Jaffee/Arnold Roth look here. If you really like this style, you should have a look at my post about Al Jaffee somewhere below. You should also get the new Tall Tales collection and while you're at it, why not order the Complete Humbug as well? This reprints the whole run of Harvey Kurtzman and Arnold Roth's (who turned out to be a co-financier) satirical magazine Humbug. Humbug was small and cheap and a reaction to the overpriced Trump... but it also contained some of the best art by Bill Elder, Arbold Roth, Blechman, Jack Davis and a host of others ever did. The reprinting has been shot from the original material(at a larger printing size than the original magazines, which were tiny) and probably has some sort of notes by Denis Kitchen as well as a new slipcover by Al Jaffee. It also has some pretty sharp satire. The 'reverse movie cliche's' is a sharp a movie satire piece as I have ever read anywhere.

As for Arnold Roth, I have quite a few samples of his sunday gag feature Poor Arnold's Almenac. But all of these have been reprinted by Fantagrphics a couple of years ago, so I am assuming anyone interested in them will have gotten a copy by now. My samples are in coloor, of course, althoughh they are not in the best printed color... I actually prefer the black and white version. I may get around to them when I get around to doing a pece about arnold Roth's early years... but if anyone is interested, please ask.

A Pain in the Ads

Wednesday advertising day.

When I first started scanning, I came across a series of interesting looking ads in a very lively style that looked like some of Lee Elias more frivolous work, signed Betts. I couldn't place the name, nor did I come across any mention of it in any books or websites about comics and comic strips or anything written about Johnstone & Cushing. I suggested the name Betts might be a pseudonym. Not very long after this I came across the the work of an illustrator called Jack Betts in some issues of Collier's in 1953. Not only did he illustrate the weekly column Keep Up With The World for more than half a year, he also illustrated at least one article, in a style that was very similar to the Ben Gay and Nestlé ads. Searching the web for a Jack Betts, again I found very little about him, apart from a short mention somewhere that he illustrated a book in the late thirties and the fact that he illustrated a booklet about the dangers of foreign spies for the Citizenship Educational Service in 1940 called Footprints of the Trojan horse; some methods used by foreign agents within the United States. So we have a name and the outlines of a career path, but he remains a mystery. How could an artist with such a distinct style appear in the late forties, work for five years an then completely disappear. There must be some people out there, who still know about Jack Betts. Maybe they can enlighten us.

A Neddy Nestlé ad from 1953:



A Peter Pain ad from 1954:



An undated Peter Pain, possibly later:



Two Keep Up With The World columns, which were illustrated by many people, but for a short period between late 1952 and fall 1953, it was Jack Betts regular assignment:




An illustrated article from November 12 1949. I have added the text, as it is still valid today. Click on the illustration to see a larger version:



As a bonus I am adding a Hank Ketcham ad from the February 3rd 1951 issue of Collier's. There's nothing remarkable about this ad, except for the fact you can see his abbreviated signature (K.) which he seems to have used for assignments he did without having to provide a gag.