The Gig Is Up

Tuesday Comic Strip Day.

I have shown Sunday from Howie Posts' seventies strip The Dropouts before, including four half page ones that came from a newspaper that was printed especially to promote the strip before it was sold. Since all of my other sheets of the strip (and I have quite few that I haven't scanned yet) are thirds (what I always call two-tiers) I wondered if the strip was actually made as a half page (three tier) when it ran or if the decision was made to just do the simpler version. One of my regular visitors told e he had indeed seen half pages of a later date, so I kept looking for them. A couple of weeks ago, I acquired a short tun of half page gags, one of which I had even already shown as a two tier. I always said that there are virtually o strips that don't look better in three tiers. In some way, it always ads an openness to the page and the gag. Or, the other way around: two tier versions often look cramped a bit - but not as much as the one fourth two tier ones you start seeing in the late seventies and on to the eighties. In fact, if I want to show one of those, I always cut them down and format them as a four tier tabloid page which suits them much better (as I have done with Virgil Partch's The Captain's Gig and my recent samples of Crock). Although the humor in these Dropout strips may seem a bit dated these pages show that Post may have been one of the most animated artists of his generation.