It's too well kknown among fans to be called a rarity, but Frank Giacoia's Sherlock Holmes (which ran as a newspaper stip in the mid fifties) has never been properly republished. There was a comic book reprint version of the dailies and a smaal black and white book of the Sundays, but that was far from compleet and the Sunday derserve to be seen in color. The Sundays are pretty hard to come by, though. Today I have three new scattered ones from the back of another strip (along with the two or three I have shown here earlier). Giacoia was a notorious procatrinator and often used his friends at DC (people such as Carmine Infantino, Gil Kane and Kine Sekowsky) to help him out.
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Thanks for these rare gems, Ger. I have passably-restored black-and-white Sundays and dailies in a 2-volume Malibu Graphics, Inc. collection. The only colour Sundays included are on the back covers - August 22, 1954 and April 17, 1955 (they mis-date the latter as 1954). Along with your samples, they give an idea how good a properly-restored version would look. Giacoia’s Sherlock Holmes may not be the most-deserving of a proper reprint but “it’s right up there” with those strips that do.
A 'properly restored' version would look even better, because for some reason my samples were not printed very well. A lot of dropout on the blacks. I have started some restoring but it's a lot of work. I also have a large run of Sundays photographed from a bound volume - which are too lowres and have a wavy quality to them. I may try and restore a few some day, but they do not even come to this quality.
Having read the Malibu version, I must say that towards the end of the strip the writing quality really goes down - especially because they start incorporating larger and larger portions of the week's continuity (and art) in the Sundays, up to the point where you don't need (or want) to read the Sundays anymore.
Further to your analysis the weekdays “bleeding” into Sundays issue must have become a worsening problem. From “From Holmes to Sherlock: The Story of the Men and Women Who Created an Icon” by Mattias Bostrom (2017): “[Edith Meiser, who completed her last radio script on Holmes in 1948 had] Friends of hers at the New York Herald Tribune..[approach] her to write a script for a strip about Sherlock Holmes. She had no idea how to go about [it] but accepted the challenge. She soon realized just how demanding it was…Adrian Conan Doyle took issue with various aspects..[and]…the hard part was to piece together the elements of the story in a way that suited this particular medium…The plot was developed in the strips that appeared in the newspapers’ weekday editions. In the Sunday editions she was obliged to merely tread water; some of the newspapers did not have a Sunday comics page while others did not publish at all on Sundays. The readers had to be able to follow the story without Sunday’s episode…Meiser always wrote the text first, and Giacoia then had the task of attempting to draw speech bubbles big enough to accomodate her dialogue.” Bostrum doesn’t say how many of the “three hundred newspapers worldwide” he mentioned carrying the strip didn’t have the Sundays, but the impression is a not insignificant number, meaning finding tear sheets for restoration purposes could be problematic.
Thanks for the quote!
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