Roland, Roland, Roland...

Monday Cartoon Day

Roland Coe was a famous cartoonist from the forties, who is mentioned in many of the 'best cartoons of the year' books of that period. His most popular work was a boyscout series for The Satorday Evening Post. It's all pretty innocent and not nearly as sharp as the cartoons done by the new generation of cartoonists that had just returned from the war. Still, his style is not entirely stuck in the thirties and he seems to have had an influence on some of the 'new' cartoonists, especially Dik Browne. Some of that influence must have come from the advertising work that he started doing after the war, which I will show next wednesday. Today I have some samples of a daily cartoons he did for most of the forties. One of those forgotten gems, I like it a lot better than the boyscout series, which only seems to have been remembered because it had regular characters.

The eariest I could find are from 1944/5:










The latest I could find is from 1952:


And these are somewhere inbetween, I guess:
cartoon









These last three, also undated may be earlier. The style here is more along the lines of William Galbreath's Side Glances.

Vitamin Q

Sunday Quik Fix.

Another story from what I consider Meskin's best period of this strip. A simole story, but look at the way he drawn multiple images. And I just love these layered group shots.

Way Out Westerns

Saturday Leftover Day.

Over at the Simon and Kirby blog at the Jack Kirby Museum, Harry Mendrick has been going through all of Jack Kirby and Joe Simon's work in the fifties month by month, trying to figure what the trends were, how much each book sold and out who did what. In his most recent post, he struggled with a piece, which some of us followers identified as the work of Pete Morisi. I have a few pieces by Morisi up already, but I promised him I would add some more, so here they are. These stories absolutely knocked me off my feet when I came across them last month. Morisi's style is what you would call an aquired taste at best. Some people find it too stiff and too mannered. But underneath all that, his storytelling is impeccable and even the style itself grows on you after a while. But as beautiful as this, I have never seen it. I do not care too much for the slabbed-on color, but in these early stories Morisi's style seems perfect to depict the beauty of the western landscape. They come from Arizona Kid #5 and #6 from 1951. I have also added a two page George Tuska story for those of you who keep mixing the two up. Although Morisi would sometimes use Tuska faces in his work, their styles here coulldn't be more different.