Girl With a Mission

Wednesday Hollywood Day.

Some years ago I collected a whole lot of Sunday strips from the Midland Reporter Telegram. The MRT was a NEA paper, which means that they had all of the lesser known and lesser distributed strips from that syndicate and the AP outfit, some of my favorites (and all very hard to find). Unfortunately the mico-fiche scans were very bad, ranging from way too dark to far too light. Cleaning out my files, I decided to share them anyway for the unseen gems that may be among them. 

Patsy in Hollywood was created by AP regular Mel Graff in a faux (but very well executed) Milt Caniff style. In the early forties the artwork was taken over by Charles Raab, one of the most forgotten Caniff illustrators. After he left to got to war, the strip was taken over by George Storm and Richard Hall, who changed it from a Caniff style adventure strip to a cuter gag strip. In Bill Dyer (1946-1955) returned it to a more adult series, which actual storylines and funny Sundays. The Sundays were marked by the fact that the last panel gag always was half a page. I have actually been able to find a few in color (as well as having an original), which I have shared earlier. But here are some more - and because the coloring was softer, the micro-fiche scans actually turned out better than the others in this series of posts.

Kid's Stuff

Wednesday Women's Way. 

Yesterday I shared six weks of Hank Barrow political cartoons. I came across them when I was loking fr some on Charles Raab's Paty in Hollywood strips, which I am sharing here. To me Raab is the most underrated of all the Milt Caniff imitators. When he did Charlie Chan, all the credit went to Alfred NAdriola. When he did Patsy, most comic bok historians say that Noel Sickles hosted most of them. That is not true. First of all, Sickles was only involved for a short period of time. He came in on fridays and sketched a week's worth of strips, which Raab subsequently embellished. Great stuff, some of the best of it's period.

 

I Was Raabed, I Say!

Saturday Lefover Day.

Of all the Milton Caniff imitators and former assistants, I find Charles Raab to be the most underrated. After starting out as an office boy at the studo Cabiff shared with Noel Sickles, he worked with Alfred Andriola on Charlie Chan. It has often been told that that strip was peobably sold because of the first wek of samples that were done by Caniff and Sickles for their 'underlings'. IDW put out nice collection of the first year or so of dailies of that strip and although the difference between that first week and the rest of the strip is clear, to me it is also clear that Raab joined Andriola pretty much from the beginning. Some people believe he may even have done the whole thing as it is commonly assumed Andriola never did a full strip on hs own in his whole life. I am still trying to find out what Andriola's own style is. Anyway, after Charlie CHan folded, Raab was chosen to take over Patsy and her Friends, a little strip about a very smart and very young girl actress, which had up to that point been done by Mel Graff in his own version of the Caniff/Sickles style. When Raab took over, very little changed. He kept it on for a couple of years, before going into the army. After he got out, he never went back to newspaper strips, but took various jobs in comics in the froties and early fifties. It is that work (some of which I have shown here) that gives me a baseline for his own stylistic markers. Where he went after the mid fifties, I don't know and despite looking for many years, I never found out. If by any chance any of his surviving relatives reads this, please get in touch. I am writing a series of articles about the Milt Caniff imitators and would like to give Raab his due.

One of the reasons he has been neglected by comic strip historians is that apparently at some point Noel Sickles assisted Raab on Patsy. As far as I know, that was not yet the case at the start shown here, but that fact alone has made most people doubt Raab's solo abillities. I say his work after the war says otherwise.