Open The Gates

Wednesday Advertising Day.

Art Gates is in my new book on Mad imitators Behaving Madly with quite a spectacular parody of the movie Blackboard Jungle with Glen Ford. It was done in the style of Harvey Kurtzman's Mad magazine parodies and it's very well drawn. At the same time cartoonist Gates was drawing romance comics in a much more realistic style, based on John Prentice's version of Alex Raymond's Rip Kirby. And he was not far away from selling a daily newspaper cartoon about his time in the army. And he had just done a four issue series of Hillbilly comics for Charlton in a style that could be called similar to Mort Drucker's movie parody style, altough Drucker hadn't invented that style yet at that point. All of these things I have shown here before and you can find them by following the link. Tat will also lead you to a series of cartoon style 'sponsored' newspaper strips featuring a Milkman. Recently I came across a longer run of these ad gags, so here they are.

The Milkman Ringeth

Tuesday Comic Strip Day.

I am a sucker for anything rare and this certainly qulifies. It is a funny strip by comic book artist and cartoonist Art Gates. Art Gates started doing cartoons in the army. After that he kept on cartooning, but he also developed himself as a realistic comic book artist. His two biggest claim to fame are a stint at Jack Kirby and Joe Simon's magazines, including Foxhole at Mainline and a funny Li'll Abner type comic book series for Charlton, both in the mid to lat fifties. He also had an army themed panel wh the late fifties, which I showed here earlier and he worked on several Joe Simon books in the late fifties and early sixties. I don't know what he did after that, but with his connection to Joe Simon it is weird that he didn't appear in Sick. He may have left comics by then. Here is an ad strip he did for most of 1959. New gags seem to have appeared once a week, although participating papers were free to use them in any order or at any date they wanted.