For most his career, Colin Allen was earning his living as a cartoonist fir all the mainstream magazines and doing illustrations for Sunday weekly magazines such as the Pictorial Review and American Weekly. As such, he is a mainstream artist that I usually skip when scanning. But from 1946 to 1954 he did a Sunday only newspaper feature that is quite a lot of fun. What A Family! was clearly a take-off of Right Around The Corner, which originated the idea of having a huge tableau of the same family, everyone doing their own thing and having their own comments on the subject of the week. Like What A Family!, Right Around Home had two panels, only in the latter case they were devided by a diagonal border. What A Family! benifits from Allen's obvious superiority as a cartoonist, though. If he had been first, this funny and colorful feature could have been big.
2 comments:
It's jarring to see everyone in the family drawn in that 30s big-foot style except for Lucretia. who is drawn in a semi-straight style that resembles early 50s clip art.
It almost seems as if someone else drew her character. It sort of reminds me when Jack Davis or Arnold Roth helped out in the Little Annie Fanny strip…their artwork didn't match Will Elder's.
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