Early Days

Monday Big Sky Day. 

What's so great about early days of any newspaper strip is, that you can see the artist finding out the rules of his world, bith visually and characterwise. Still Tom K. Ryan knew pretty soon what he was about. 

If You Don't Succeed, Try, Try and Fail Again

 Sunday Sunny Day.

I have shared large portions of Gill Fox's work here. He came to my attention as on eof the regulars at the Johnstone and Cushing agency, but I soon found out he had been a funny and adaptable artist long before and after thta. In teh firties he was one of the people wokring with Jack Cole and could do a pretty good approximation of his style. In the sixties he took over The Neighbours daily panel from George Clark. In the late fifties he adapted his style to that of Dennis the Menace's Hank Ketcham, creating the filler tabloid Sunday half Bumper to Bumper for the New York News. He also did his own Dennis the Menacd panel... twice. He started the feature Wilbur, a panel about a pesky kid like Dennis, interacting mostly with his dad. But is was smaller than Dennis an dprobably cheaper. The gags weren't up to Ketcham's standard (hey, even Ketcham's gags weren't always). and the feature seems to have disappeared after a couple of years. In 1958 the same kid reappeared as Wilbert. Maybe with the same old gags, maybe not. At least in one case, they were used in the same paper.

My Favorite Smell

 Friday Tonic Day.

One of the most remarkable characters in a popular newspaper comic strip was Fearles Fossdick in Li'll Abner. A parody of Dick Tracy, he was introduced by Abner reading about him in the paper. Even more remarkable is the ad campaign for Wildroot Tonic Water he hosted throughout the fifties. I gathered as many as I could form this Lake Erie paper. I thought there would be doubles, but scrolling through them just now, I could not find nearly as many as I would have suspected. Probably done by his assistants, the strips are completely in the style that was established by Capp.