Did You Know?

Tuesday What The Heck Day. 

Finally some time to do another post and share some weird material. I have been collection ads that use the Ripley's Format of facts and information. Apart from Ripley's, there were quite a few in the newspapers, Elsie Hix's Stranger Than It Seems as one of the most familiar. But tehre were a lot of local versions and it was used as a staple format for oil industries and other big firms such as General Electric. I recently went through a bunch of Junior Scholastic magazines of the late fifties and came across a couple that seemed familiar even apart from the format. Let me show them first and talk about them after.

So the last of these seems to be clearly by Leonard Starr. I don't know if it is a solo job he did or via Johnstone and Cushing, I will have to check. But if there are more out there, I would love to see them. The second one is signed with an inwards curled IN, which was the signature of Irving Novick. Who was working for the Johnstone and Cushing produced Boy's Life section (and doing illustrations inside that magazine as well). The first one is unknown, but the Nick connection makes me wonder if he did this too. But he didn't sign it and he was never known for doing that type of charcoal pencil ggreys. It's not Starr either, but other artists from that pool include Lou Fine and Alex Kotzky. Either of which could do figures like the guy in the third panel. As long as I am showing stuff from Junior Scholastic magazine, here are three illustrations by Al Wenzel, who at that time was also doing pencil assistance on Steve Roper. I have three sets of seven or eight magazines from 1957 and 1958, all for sale cheaply on Ebay.