Doc's Docs

Tuesday Comic Strip Day.

I got to know Michael Vassello online. He ran a Yahoo group about the comic book company Timely/Atlas, where Stan Lee was the editor. HIs enthousiasm inspired me and I got involved as well. After years of online talks and collaborations we met and immediately hit it off. Most of that was his doing, he is just a very sociable people person who is able to connect with lots of people. Still, wherever we looked we found new things in common (besides our age). And this keeps hapening. When I met him this year, I found out that he grows and bottles his own peppers, which happens to be a bobby of mine as well (the growing and consuming, not the bottling). Recently, he started buying Sunday sections from the the New York paper of his youth, this time following in my footsteps because I too had a passion for the New York Sunday. A couple of years ago I even went to the New York Public Library to look at their microfiche files of that paper, when they still had those in a special room on the first floor.

Of course Michael is a bit more thorough and singleminded than I am and his collection of The New York Sunday is already bigger than anything I ever have. He has started a facebook group about it, where he shows his scans. It is called The New York Sunday News Comics History Group and you have to apply for it - and then you can see your timeline fill up with scan after scan, so be prepared.

One of the strips Michael likes and shows a lot it The Ripples by George Clarke. It was best known for the panel version (as Side Glances)  that ran in many papers. But in the forties there also was a daily version, which I have also shown from time to time. But with Michael scanning away at the speed he does, most of my samples have become absolete. Certainly the black and white versions I hoarded because of a lack of better material.