Sunday, November 02, 2008

The Last of The Mo/Hogans

Sunday leftover Day.

As promised here are some of the goodies Irv Spector's son Paul sent me.

Tuesday we had some discussion about Indians with unions and Paul sent me this 'related' panel.



It was apparently taken from one of the strips Spector drew after the cancellation of Coogy to try and transform it into a 'regular' daily (and Sunday) strip. According to Paul his father drew and redrew so many versions of this strip idea that he isn't even sure if it was ever submitted to a syndicate. It seems Spector started out with the Coogy and Mo duo, keeping them in their original setting. Pretty soon they were transformed into really human indians instead of animals and at some point it seems Coogy even disappeared or, as Paul puts it, 'got anglicised'.

These are interesting to see as well, because they show Spector's pencilling at that time. His inking was so impressive and stylized that it can be hard to see his pencilling style. Paul has also assisted some cartoon industry historians in getting his father's storyboard from the early sixties shown to the world, but there his work is often so sketchy and simple (dictated by the needs of the storyboard and the television cartoons they were made for), that it can't be seen as his 'real style' either. The first one has a union theme as well. Enjoy.

2 comments:

p spector said...

Actually there weren't too many versions of this strip: one in pencil, and then when inked the changes were made, not just cleaned up but the how the characters appeared as well. They never started out as the cloned Coogy and Mo, only reminiscent of them.

Regarding the storyboard, which can been seen in two parts HERE, this would actually be a very accurate representation of his "real style", as it relates to how many animated cartoon looked in the late 1950s through a lot of the 60s. As I explained in my email to you, comic strips are really an entirely different animal from the animation process. For any storyboard, this is in fact not sketchy and simple at all. Not all that many boards would be rendered as finished or completely, let alone with dashes of color here and there.

p spector said...

BTW, as an "inside" reference, the Emery Hawkins character come across in the desert is in fact a real person who would make anyone's short list of all-time top animators, known best for his work at Warner Bros.