In the forties and fifties everyone wanted to have a newspaper strip. At least thta's the story we are told time and again. But in fact, there were many artists who had a newspaper strip and left it to do comics. And not just getting cancelled, but actually leaving it for another artist to carry on. One such artists was John Spranger, the former Eisner assistant and Quality artist, who took on the strip Bodyguard with writer (and cartoonist) Lawrence Lariar. After a while the strip was taken over by Carl Pfeufer after which it was renamed The Bantam Prince and ran for quite a while. Now it could be that the tone of the strip had changed so that Spranger was no longer the most suited artist, but my guess is that the sales were not good enough for Spranger to keep on doing it. Which is saying a lot if you know what the earnings were on comic books. At least they had a good run and in the early days the strip didn't even look that bad. A bit like The Saint, which started around the same time and went on to run for all of the fifties.
5 comments:
Wow! I never knew that Lariar wrote a comic strip. Thanks for this, Ger.
Lariar also wrote a strip with Lou Fine for Liberty for over a year (two pages weekly, although after 30 weeks those two pages shrunk to 2/3 page each). I have 60% complete and will do something wth it as soon as I have them all, maybe make an ebook.
The Ben Friday strip (including this specific story was re-printred in color in Famous Funnies starting around issues 190. I've seen a small sample of the Liberty two-pager strip and it looks like grand fun. I would like to see a large sample (hint, hint).
I never got Famous Funnies and certainly didn't know it had color pages!
Oh, the comic book! I thought it was one of tjose reprint newspapers of fandom!
Post a Comment