Tell Them Pat Sent You

Wednesday Advertising Day.

Over the years I have shown various comic strip ads from the Sunday papers by Lou Fine. I realy like his slick style and it works very well with adventurous strips such as the Sam Spade/Charlie Wild series for Wildroot. But he also had a lighter side, which shows ncely in the less traditional Going To Town series. I am not quite sure what it advertises, supposedly by House Beautiful Magazine columnist Pat Guinan, altough I could never find proof of that. In fact it is a collection of small ads in the disguise of buying tips'. On eof the most frequent items advertosed is The American Weekly and apart from that I see a lot of Proctor and Gamble products. The attraction of these ads to me is the fatc that Lou Fine was asked to draw many different vignettes for them. The color samples I scanned this week all came from the back of another strip and were cut in such a way that I had to drop two panels to make them look a bit more attractive. In the black and white samples you can see the original format.

Unique Selling Point

Wednesday Advertising Day.

I scanned a couple of new ads and added two I am not sure I shared before.

I have this one down as probably encilled by jack Btts, but inked by someone else at Johnstone and Cushing.

In the mid to late fifties Bob Bugg did various cigarette ads for Reynolds brands. Most famous of course (and I show just about all of them if you follow the link) is the Sgt. Bilko series he did for Camels. But in addition to those he also did a couple of single Camels ads. I have shown two, and this is another one.

Up to the midfifties, Camels were most famous for their celebrity endorsement comic strip ads, like this one.

I have shown quite a few of these weird ads which seem to have been produced by Lou Fine. Most of them in black and white, taken from microfiche online sources, but some selfscnned and in color, like this new one.

If one ad series deserves a complete reprinting it is those delightful Pepsi Cops which ran all the way through the forties and was done by various artists (which you can see if you follow the link). They were probably designed by the first artist, Rube Goldberg, as you can see in this early sample.

And this one is completely new and unknown to me as well.

Not His Finest Hour

Wednesday Advertising Day.

Lou Fine was on eof the most prolific comic artits working in Sunday Newspaper adevertising. His clean, crisp style was very popular and his work never looked rushed or cheap. One of his many 'series' was Going to Town, a sort of magazine feature page, where columnist Pat Guinan helped the ladies to find 'what to buy' This of course was an excuse to have several 'sponsors' advertising under one banner. The early samples of this half page feature had great illustrations and ust have provided some sort of entertainment. Later in the run, the series wound down, the illustration becoming less and less interesting and finally it ended as an almost text only two tier feature.

I have shown many sample of the early amples, but here are some of the later ones I came across on the back of some strips I was scanning. in some cases the top is missing, but it doesn't really matter.

Could There Be Anything Finer?

Wednesday Advertising Day.

I just love the advertising work of Lou Fine. I know there are some, who think he sold out big time when he switched from his vituoso comic book style from the early forties to his more bourgeois slick style, but his work retained a vibrancy that made him stand out oevra ll his contemporaries while being very, very commercial as well. I understand a book about his career is in the works and I can only hope it will give as much attention to his middle years as the better documented early and later stages of his work. If not, you can always come here, as I have shown some of his best and most unknown advertising work. Such as there spot illustrations for the two weekly Going to Town feature he did in the early fifties. These scans were taken from the back of some strips I ordered from e-bay. A pleasant surprise, even though some of the edges didn't quite make the cut.

Pat Solutions

Wednesday Advertising Day.

On the back of some of the Beetle Baileys I showed 'yesterday' were some more samples of Pat Guinan's supposed Going to Town column (which was actually a very obvious way of packing together a lot of small ads under a column umbrella). Unfortunately I haven't finished scanning those yet, but I did get a lot of new black and white copoes. I have pasted those together with the old ones I had (which do include some color ones). Last time I posted them I mentioned that the series might have been made by Johnstone and Cushing, but after having seen so many Lou Fine ads I am pretty sure he took charge of the account somewhere in late 1950 or early 1951. As far as I know Fine worked from a studio of his own, so if he did not do the ones before that (and my earliest sample is from 1947) I am not sure who were responsible when and why the change was made. At least the vignettes became a lot more interesting when Fine took over.

The series went on into 1954, when it seems it may have been downsized.

May 28 1947:


November 12 1950:


November 19 1950:


Januari 21 1951:


Februari 4 1951:


Februari 18 1951:


March 4 1951:


May 27 1951:


May 4 1952:


May 18 1952:


June 29 1952:


July 13 1952:


Dec 28 1952:


October 9 1953:


August 23 1953:


October 3 1954: