Seven Year Itch

Thursday Story Strip Day.

Here's a post I have been working on for a long time. Regular followers of my blog know I am a big fan of the laer work of Lou Fine. I know there are some (probably most) who prefer his earliers showy work. It was Will Eisner himself who said that Fine's handling of the brush was one of a kind. But I learned of his work from the Menommannee Faals Gazette, the week paper from the seventies and eighties that reprinted newspaper strips both from it's time and rare and colectable strips from Britain and the American past. It is there I first saw Neal Adams' Ben Casey, Modesty Baise, The New Seekers, Juliet Jones, Mary Perkins and other great story strips. And Lou Fine's hardbild detective strip Peter Scratch from the mid sixties. I really liked that strip and I really liked the style of it. The stories didn't grab me as much, but that didn;'t really matter. When I later came across Fine's advertising work in the fifties and his previous newspaper strip Adam Ames (whose storline I did like) I was even more impressed, so Peter Scratch sort of fell to the background.

Recently, I came aross a set of Peter Scratch Sundays that rekindled my interest in this last work of Fine. I still think it is not as great as his work in the forties, fifties and early sixties. As the decade progressed, more and more of the soap opera strips codefied their styles and fell into a sort of rut. But it is nice to some of these together and it is nice to finally see some Sundays.

I have added some of the black and white samples I have, including an announcement and the first daily, but the real gold is further on, with the color scans. I have also added a couple of new color Sundays from Butch Guice's Facebook page.