It Is A Man's Work

Sunday Review Day.

Before Stan Drake was asked to do The Heart of Juliet JOnes, he worked mainly in advertising and as an illustrator. One of his regular clients was Blie Book magazine. I have shown some of his work there before, which you will see if you follow the link. You'll also find his work for the King Features soap opera serial in Pictorial Review, which I believe is what got him the Juliet Jones job. These are all from the September 1952 issue of Blue Book.

The Heart of Stan Drake

Saturday Leftover Day.

For today I prepared a special one-off. In the past I have showed here a lot of Sundays from Stan Drake's Juliet Jones as well as many of the side projects he did (mainly before) his seminal soap opera strip. Drake started out at Johnstone and Cushing (well, he did some work before that, including some illustration work in the war which I have somewhere but can't find anymore), developing his own version of the photo realistic 'advertising style'.

After that, it was always assumed that he went on directly to Juliet Jones, when King Features head Syvan Beck and writer Margeret Mitchell (trying to develop a soap opera strip) discovered him at the same time in advertising. But as I showed here in an earlier post, he was also doing illustrations for a serialized soap opera series in King Features' Pictorial Review supplement - a much more likely lead-in to Juliet Jones. Well, it turns out he also did illustration work for other magazines, most notably Bluebook. Bluebook was a monthly adventure story magazine, which appeared alongside the much more popular and better known Redbook. Copies of this early fifties magazine are not easy (or cheaply) to come by, but I have two in my collection.

So today I went and cleaned up scans from the stories Drake illustrated in the January and December issues.

The Great Illustrator

Wednesday Advertising Day.

It is pretty well known that before he did Juliet Jones (and Blondie) Stan Drake was a commerical artist who worked at Johnstone and Cushing until 1950 and for his own company in the years after that up until he was hired by King Features to do Juliet Jones. If you want to read the highlights version of this story you can find it on the Stan Drake page of the Cartoonist Society website (http://www.reuben.org/2010/11/ncs-spotlight-on-stan-drake/):

For many of us the name Stan Drake is synonymous with beautifully rendered ink line drawings of gorgeous gals and handsome men, as featured in Drake’s seminal romance comic strip, “The Heart of Juliet Jones”. Surprisingly, in an interview in issue #72 of CARTOONIST PROfiles magazine, Drake spoke candidly of what might be called his true cartooning style: “I really am a cartoonist,” said Drake. “I had to work hard at drawing straight, illustrative type stuff. I started out with Johnstone & Cushing (the advertising cartoon firm) right after the war and my bent was really towards the semi-funny stuff. When I got into advertising, an art director told me, “If you want to make out in this business, you must learn how to draw pretty girls and handsome men.” So I recall that I bought copies of ‘Vogue’, ‘Harpers Bazaar’ and ‘Mademoiselle’, and when I got home, I’d place some vellum over the heads of the pretty girls in the magazines, and I must have traced seven or eight hundred heads in this way.” 

What this doesn't show is the fact that in the late forties Drake did a lot of very realistic pulp covers, which are gathered on this magnificent website: http://www.pulpartists.com/Drake.html.

 Around 1950 Stan Drake left Johnstone & Cushing to form his own art studio, Drake-Kittelsen, with a lettering man named Harry Kittelsen. During this period Stan Drake continued drawing advertising spots and strips – and even did story illustrations for what was at that time a popular men’s adventure magazine called Blue Book. “I was working all the time up to the point where I had a nervous breakdown. Bob Lubbers, my old friend from art school, called me up one day, he was doing TARZAN at the time, and he said, “Listen, why don’t you get smart? Don’t commute to New York from Long Island anymore. Don’t go through that rat race. You’re killing yourself already, at age thirty!” And he said, “Why don’t you take some of those samples up to King Features? It’s the biggest syndicate in the world. Get a comic strip. You could do a comic strip, and you could work at home, and you could relax. So I took his advice.” The result, of course, was Stan Drake’s masterful The Heart of Juliet Jones, which he co-created with writer Elliot Caplan.


Again, a shortcut is taken here. As I have shown in an earlier post, Drake's first work for King Features was a fairly long run as the illustrator for the Jan and Bill soap opera serial in their Pictorial Review section. Coming years before Juliet Jones it must have been a factor in his being chosen for that. But since Drake never mentioned it himself it seems to have been left out of every history of his career.

What hasn't been left out is the fatc that he drew ad for Ipana tooth paste at Johnsone and Cushing. The Sundays are obviously his, but there were also daily ads that were published once a week. I do not see Drake's lovely ink line, but he may still have been developing that. I have shown a couple before, but maybe a longer run will make it easier to see if he actually did these as well.

Another Fine Stress

Saturday Leftover Day.

After writing my piece about Dave Sim's Glamourpuss this week, I went back to NewspaperArchive and tried to pull a full run of Stan Drake's illustrations for King Feature's weekly soap opera series Jan & Bill by Adele Garrison. What I ended up with and am showing here should be every episode of April to December 1951. There were more in 1952 (some of which I have shown earlier, follow the tag) but this seems to be where Drake's involvement with this feature started. Unfortunately, not having read the whole thing (and neither wil I expect you to do), I had a hell of a time to put it together. What should be a straightforward run of chapters, seems a jumble of stories and chapter numbers. So, using the story titles and the next week blurns, I set out to put them in the right order, only to fins a couple of strange gaps. The first story is almost complete. It seems to have a gap with #11 (possibly a gaffe on my part), but I am pretty sure that where I pick up with #12, it's still the same storyline. That story ends with chapter #21, announcing 'new adventures'. After that, unfortunately, I don't have the first episode of the New Adventures of Jan & Bill, but to make things even more complicated, the title drops the adage 'new adventures' after two more episodes. Still, the story titles and next week blurbs keep everything on line. After that it only becomes more complicated. The gaos get bigger and bigger, even though I am sure I have not missed out any large chuncks.. the pure number of scans here even preclude that. In 39 weeks there can't have been more than 39 pages, unless I missed a seperate serial running alongside this one. And to top it all, we end on a mysterious episode that seems to be Chapter #41. The end of the story dictates that it comes at the end of the christmas episodes, but it also mentions a murder attempt, which I am sure refers to the earlier story.

Anyway, the first story seems to be all there. Maybe someone at Classic Comics Press (the publishers of that wonderful collection of Drake's Heart of Juliet Jones, follow the link) will make sense of it today. Until then for you (and for Dave Sim) here is most of Stan Drake illustrations for 1951 - I think.












One episode missing...












First episode missing...






Some stuff missing...




One episode missing...












Some stuff missing...