One of my regular visitors asked for more samples of Kerry Drake. I never collected or scanned them because even though the strip was everywhere, I don't think it was visually satisfying enough. Some of the stories are quite good, but I never came a cross a longer or more complete run. hat I do have, are a few of the earliers pages, when Alfred Andriola was still switching his style from Caniff-influenced one to the Caniff light version he maintained through the rest of the forties. In the early fifties, he gave the job to his assistant Sururi Gumen, who toiled nameless on the strip until the end. Gumen's best work can be found on Andriola's 'other' strip, by the way: It's Me Dilly.
I have Blackthorn Publishing's 1987 72-page Shel Dorf-edited reprint of Kerry Drake 1940's daily-Sunday continuities in black and white, which look OK, including a 1947 article "Meet the Artist" indicated as being in Andriola's own words. I didn't know, as he implies in the article, that Kerry Drake was supposedly derived from "Dan Dunn" which latter, he says, he had a chance to "handle" for Publishers Syndicate after Charlie Chan had run its course. He also states that (as you probably know) Dan Dunn was replaced by Publishers with Kerry Drake in 1943. Looking forward to getting LOAC's 1-year sampling of Norman Marsh's Dan Dunn, the ersatz competitor of Dick Tracy, from its first year+.
ReplyDeleteI have Dan Dunn on my blog, and I ever got the impression that is was a prototype for Ken Drake. What happened was that Andriola sold Kerry Drake on the promiss that he would continue Dan Dunn for at least half a year and he proceeded to make as much a detective strip as Kerry Drake would be.
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