The Fabuleous Fifties

Hidden Treasures

Friday Comic Book Day.

Here are the final installments of Bob Powell's What a Work series. You can now enjoy all of them here on The Fabuleous Fifties. I think Powell is a vastly underrated artist whose wrok holds it own against that of Will Eisner. He has two strikes against him, one that he never had a break-out strip like the Spirit. As good an artist as Powell was, he was not as good a writer as Eisner (even though Eisner did employ others to do that for him in the end). Secondly, he died too young in the mid-sixties.

The response to these Powell posts have been very meager. Most of the other artists I have picked, have met with some sort of cheering. Powell's work has been met with a resounding silence. The Journalista blog found them interesting enough to link too them, but that is about all of the confirmation I have had. Apparently, my respect for the man's work is not shared as acutely by my readers as I would have thought. Still, the posts remain here for anyone to see and drop by, so I hope I may have attributed to his recognition in some way.

I will continue to post the rest of the Bat Masterson strips, even though they are muddy and all in all it seems to me Powell was less effective as a newspaper strip artist than he is here. I have seen many commercial or educational comics, like this is, but none of them have the daring page lay-out Powell uses. After this series he did another one about a Mexican priest, which I will share at a later point.