The Fabuleous Fifties

It's A Dog's Meal

Wednesday Advertising Day.

Today a simple post, just one little ad. But let's take a closer look at it.



The layout of this strip is one that was used more often for newspaper comic strip advertisements. The big image on the left, talking heads on the right. Sometimes the advertisement agencies used 'real' magazine illustrators for these ads and that first image was their calling car. It is surprising to see how many of these illustrators were able to do a reasonable fascimile of a comic strip when they had to do line art. Retroactively, we call this style the 'illustration style' and I always thought that it eveolved from the work of people such as Alex Raymond and Lou Fine, who had been looking at agazine illustrations a lot. But the more magazines I see, the more I realize it may also have been created naturally by magazine illustrators who had to do little spot illustrations in line. In which case it did not come from comic artists trying to look more illustatorlike but from illustrators adaptin gto the limitations of comics.

Anyway, this strip seems to be a bit more comic booky than others. The inking is in the then popular Milt Caniff/Noel Sickles school of lack and white contrast. The shadows on the folds and the lines in the faces look as if they have been done quickly, even though the overall effect is one of control. The fact that the artist doesn't use lines around the 'panels' suggest an illustrator at work, but the pacing and acting is in line with what one would see in a Dell movie adaptation.

All in all a pretty well executed piece of work.