As promised, I am following my run of Hap Hopper with Jack Sparling second strip, Claire Voyant. Claire Voyant was published by the left wing PM newspaper, but it got a wider circulation. Like Hopper, it had a man and a woman in the lead. But this time, the girl got the top billing. And rightfully so. Although Sparling's sometimes scratchy line was a bit out of date at this time (he changed it when he got into comics) he managed to keep this strip running for a couple of years. Every overview always says that 'getting your own newspaper strip' was the dream of every artist, but Jack Sparling is a good example of how it could also be a trap. Four years he spent on Claire Voyant, not receiving the success that would warrant the amount of work. After that he left newspaper strips and concentrated purely on comic books for a long time.
When you upload images to Blogger you get to see them all together in a loading window. Seeing these all together, it struck me that the coloring on this strip did not help. It is flat an unimaginative (and it only gets worse as the strip goes along). I don't know if that is the fault of the Chicago paper I got these from or if it was Sparling's own color guides. But you only need to compare it to Steve Canyon or Bruce Gentry or even George Wunder's Terry and the Pirates to see it would not have been one of the first things you read in your paper.
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