Here is the last set of the run of Hap Hopper Sundays I have bought and scanned for you. I do have a couple more, but none as continuesly running as these. Although Jack Spar;ing cleaned up his act and became a lot more accomplished artist with his next strip Claire Voyant (which I will be showing later), I like the illustrative qualities of Hap Hopper and Sparling's grasp of comic stoytelling and I wonder why this strip never became as well know as some of it's contemporaries. Having seen other forgotten gems like this in the last few years (not in the least George Cark's The Ripples) I can't help but wonder if comic strip historians weren't subtlely influenced by which strips survived into the period they were writing and which ones disappeared along the way.
2 comments:
I completely agree with you. It seemed as the strip moved to a continuity the art, if anything, got better and it became in a curious sense almost a "perfect" strip: a very good balance between story and art, even though one would say it does not stand up against some of its more famous and well-known contemporaries - looking forward to Claire Voyant.
I liked his art a little bit better when it was a bit more cartoonish and even suspect he looked at Will Eisner a bit. But when it the Sundays moved to continuity, as you say, the art got a little bit more illustrative. When he did Claire Voyant he returned to the more cartoony approach.
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