Old School Detective

Thursday Story Strip Day.

More then twenty years ago I tried to get hold of as many issuues of The Menomonnee Falls Gazette as possible. Postage from the US was still cheap and everyone was trying to get rid of them because they take up so much room in you collection. The Gazette was a weekly paper reprinteng the best if the seventies adventure strips (which very often were strips that were running on their alst legs by then) and reprinting memorable strips from the years before as well as a couple of lesser known classics from British papers. These days, they are worth quite a lot of money, selling fro $10 to $15 each and the postage has gone up (as well as losing the option of having large lots delivered more cheaply). which means I have a very spotty selection of it 250+ issues. One of the strips that would make me go bakc and buy all of them is the rerpinting of Lou Fines sixties classic Peter Scratch. A solid detective strip in a soldi style, Scratch ran from the mearly to the late sixties and was drawn by Fine in his by then possibly already oldfashioned 'illustrator's style'. He had dveleoped this style in the mid forties as a reaction to Alex Raymond going from Flash Gordon to Rip Kirby and he was a master at it. Okay, financial and printing realities forced him to cut some corners towards the later part of his run and for some reason the Sundays were never the high point, but what I could see of it, it is a strip I wouldn't mind being collected in some sort of clever format. I have shown everal earlier, including a nice run of Sundays.