Friday Comic Book Day.
From the Heritage site, here is the original art version of a short story yesterdays Tom Corbett artist Ray Bailey drew for one of Harvey's war books. Since he also did the Steve Canyon comic book for them, the connection is obvious and there must be more. I didn't see any of these or if I have I may have assumed they were the work of Lee Elias. He worked in a similar style, but different.
4 comments:
I ran this story on one of my sites a while back from the comic and I, too, guessed it to be Lee Elias. Have made a notation there correcting that. Thanks!
I think the difference is, that Bailey's work looks even more like Caniff's. In Elias case, it usually only the inking. Here it's the faces as well. Then again, Heritage has been know to be wrong about it's attributions...
I wonder...It doesn't look like Elias to me, but neither can I find the "Baileyisms" I would expect. I'm especially puzzled by how closely the artist followed Caniff's face designs, his method of drawing Asians, and his posing. From "Bruce Gentry" I gathered that Bailey was much more his own man than this, especially given that this isn't a licensed story and thus there's no reason he should imitate Caniff's style so carefully.
On the other hand it's quite a good job of drawing. It's not the work a humdrum artist doing his Caniff. Both Elias and Bailey stood above most of the comic book Caniffists. So unless this is an unknown maybe it IS one of them.
If you have seen the color version on Steve's site, you'll know this story is from the first war issue in 1951, even before Bailey started the Caniff comc book series.
On the other hand, I had always thought he went from Bruce Gentry to Tom Corbett. Why would he do a story such as this in between. The Bailey list at the GCD seems woefully incomplete and offers no help. I see it also has him doing an early House of Mystery story - another mix-up with Elias?
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