Saturday Cleaning my computer day.
I recently (re)discovered the teen humor strip Kathy from Standard, which was drawn and signed by Clark Haas for seventeen issues. Stilistically Kathy is a complete beauty. Haas' stule seemed to me to be heavily influenced by Roy Crane and upon checking I saw that indeed Haas had worked as Crane's assistent. But underneath that was a realism that hints towards his later collaboration with Alex Toth. Like Toth, Haas was a master at finding the right moment for each of his characters in every panel. I would recommend his work for the posing quality to every artist. But this time around, it wasn't Haas' work (and there is a lot of it) in Kathy, but the additional fillers that were done by others. Among the contribution artists I recognized Paul Robinson (whose long running newspaper strip Etta Kettt was also published by Standard), suspect Chic Stone to have been there, saw some text illustrations by Vince Colletta (possibly with Mike Sekowsky) and did not recognize the signed text illustrations by Dan Lopresti.
But most importantly, in many issues fillers and short stories were made by Dan DeCarlo and Rudy LaPick. The team of DeCarlo and LaPick did stories and fillers like this for almost every publisher, even while DeCarlo was doing his own regular teen girls for Timely/Atlas as well as other solo work. LaPick was related to his wife and they often worked together on other stuff. I have collected all of them here. The first filler is in Kathy #6, but after that they did several pages each issue. In #14 and #15 they are absent and after that it seems to me that LaPick returned on his own or with another penciller.
Kathy 6
Kathy 7
