Off To Work We Go

Monday Cartoon Day.

Alan Holtz of The Stripper's Guide call George Scarbo a 'true workhorse of the NEA Features Syndicate'. Every syndicate worth it's money had a subscription service, where you could get a whole package of stuff to fill your newspaper with: articls, columns, photo services, comics and little illustrated features. To provide allt his, these syndicates employed staffs of talented young artists. The AP syndicate was known for having All Capp, Milton Caniff, Noel Sickles and Mel Graff. I have also shown work of one of their lesser known workers, Hank Barrow. Another artist associated with them was Morris, who even did the AP strip Scorchy Smith for a short while in the early sixties. George Scarbo worked for NEA and specilized in caricatures and funny animals. He later became best know for his Sunday only comic strip The Comic Zoo and was the first artist to illustrate NEA's later famous Christmas strips. He also did lots and lots of specialty art and panels, which I am showing here.

See You in Heaven

Friday Christmas treat.


For many years several syndicates would offer newspaper a free strip for the month leading up to christmas. One of the most famous ones was NEA, whose series included a retelling of A Christmas Carol, a strip with The Little People, which lead to a new syndicated series and an offering by famous comic book artist Wallace Wood. Here is a lesser know strip, by an artist I have never heard about before, Ben Martin. The ony mention I ca find is on Alan Holtz excellent Stripper's Guide page. He mentions a Ben Martin who was an editor at the Herald Tribune later in that decade. As such he may have been responsible for a lot of very good buys, including Johnny Reb, Al Jaffee's Tall Tales, Arnold Roth's Poor Arnold's Almanac and a strip by David Gantz which I'll show next year.

Tomorrow a Christmas sequence from a running strip with a much more serious tone.