Tuesday Comic Strip Day.
Somehow I never want to like Blondie, but when you look close at them it is immediately clear how ell made they are. Especially in the late forties and fifties when Paul Fung jr. was ghosting them (as opposed to the mid sixties when he was allowed to sign them, but the quality dropped). I have said before and still feel that the 'cropped' version you see in the first few sampled is better balanced than the 'elongated' one. I get the impression the 'cropped' version is the original and the other the product of some assistant adding some space so the same strip can be run in a smaller amount of newspaper space.
...In my ultra-limited exposure to the Harvey Comics version of the Bumstead-verse I noticed that they ran " full-length " , Harvey-style , stories of the characters , five pages long , which did not bear any credits or signature...And , again in the Harvey style , 1/2-page to two-page nontitled gags...........which DID bear the " Chic Young " signature !!!!!!!!!!!
ReplyDeleteSignatures on the gags , but not on the full-length stories . Why ?????
My theory is that the gags were products of the Young studio , strip ideas that weren't quite good enough - or size-fitting I suppose - for the dailies .
Bluntly , the comic books got given the " not quite suitable for a strip " ideas as the gag pages in the comic book . What do you think ???????