I have to admit that I have shown samples of today's treat before, but those were only dailies and black and white microfiche scans. Teena-A-Go-Go is the last big project by Bob Powell before he sadly died of cancer in 1967. Writer Bessy Little had been involved with girl magazines from the forties on. She first worked for the teenage and women magazines from Martin Goodman's Timely/Atlas comics, stuff like both the comic book and the magazine version of Miss America. By the early sixties she had become the editor of the popular girls' magazine Teen Life, which was mostly made up with articles and photo features about the popular pop band heroes of the day. Early in she introduced comics to that magazine as well, using Bob Powell for various short stories (one of which, featuring Herman and the Hermits) I have shown here before. She also started the black and white Teen-A-Go-Go strip with Powell, often using a small image of the titular hero on the cover. Around the same time, or slightly thereafter, she managed to sell a newspaper strip version of the same strip, which ran daily and Sunday for most of 1966. I had seen some of those dailies (and showed them here) but recently I came across a couple of Sundays, which were even more impressive than I thought from the black and white copies I saw. I will try and find some more dailies to ad to this, but for now, just feast your eyes.
I also found an online source for this strip, so I have added the first few Sundays in black and white. If you come back in a couple of months I will probably have added the rest of it's five month run. I do. ot yet have the accompanying dailies, but it seems to me that the dailies and Sundays had seperate storylines. As noted in the comments, the second story here is exceptionel in the fact that it shows a catfight between women over a flimsy dress and ends up with one of them in her bra. However that got past the cencors we'll never know. Maybe Bessy Little's track recond and seniority helped.
3 comments:
A Sunday catfight ending with the heroine undressed to her bra? I can't believe this ran in American papers. Even in the early eighties the syndicate I worked for was skittish about a bikini babe!
Unbelievable, right?
Many artists burned out fast in this medium, but this strip and the HENRY BREWSTER comic book show Powell still in peak form, 25 years in. Good looking comic!
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