Browne and Haenigsen 1

 Saturday Leftover Day.

 Someweger around this time (maybe even last week), the latest issue of HOgan's Alley was launched. Hogan's Alley is a magazine about newspaper comics (ans all the surrounding areas), with article, interviews and reviews about every possible subject from the 120+ year of comic book history. I submitted an article about one of my favorite oscure subjects, one that is shared with editor Tom Heintjes. It is a short but heavily illustrated piece about the goings-on at the JOhnstone and Cushing advertising talent agency, that helped procuce about half of all the comic strip ads that appeared in newspapers (and sometimes comics or magazines). Tom wrote the one and only sensible article about J&C, which is still available from their website. 

One of the better know artists of this talent agency is Dik Browne. I collected as much of his work asd I could and most of what I could find is still on show in this blog. The color ads were scanned from my own collection, the black and white stuff is from micro-fiche sources. I have also found and included some of the rare daily ads Dik Browne did, often in  long running series. From 1948 he developed a very distinguishable style (often with Gill Fox as his inker, but not always), whoch was based on the style of Harry Haenigsen's then very popular newspaper strip Penny. In the  mid-fifties Browne further developed that style into the one he used for Hi and Lois - his first seccesful newspaper strip with Mort Walker. Later he showed even more of his own style in his second hit, Hägar the Horrible. For this he partically turned back to his earlier pre Penny influcenced style, which he used when he joined J&C after the war.

The article is the result of another find of mine, a late 30's J&C advertising strip by Haenigsens, called Colonel Goodbreath. To my surprise it was very comparable to the first postwar style of Browne, making that Haenigsen-inspired as well. The article covered all that, with a lot of illustrations. 

To accompany the article, I am now uploading all of the illustrations that couldn't be included with the article. That will take quite a few posts, because I have discovered some beauties I haven't shared yet.

The first is a set of ads for Bolster candy bars that I scanned from a bound book of daily newspapers form December 1949. I have shown more of these from microfiche, but this whole month shows how many of them were done in a short period.