Art Vs Opinion

Saturday Leftover Day. 

For me Hank Barrow is one of the biggest talents to come out of the Associated Press art department in the thirties. Okay, there was Al Capp. And Noel Sickles. And Milt Caniff. And Mel Graff.  And George Wunder. And Doin Flowers. But they all made their biggest splashes after they left the bullpen. And there was Morris, who took over AP's Scorchy Smith in 1959-61. Barrow was definitvely better than him.

Hank Barrow first became visible, when he took over the daily panel The Gay Thirties from Milt Caniff, who took off to do some adventure strip. But he really came into his own when he started doing political cartoons for the AP pares in the early forties (alongside Noel Sickles). I have a large collection of those cartoons and have shown quite a few through the years (and I am still not done yet scanning). His cartoons were sharp, very well drawn and may have had the best comic strip lettering I have ever seen.

After the war, he took on a weekly feature called Things To Come, about possible future inventions. It was similar to the later Radebaugh feature Closer Than We Think - but funnier. I have shown as many of those as I could lay my hands on as well.

In august 1949 he joined the Omaha World-Herald as a regular political cartoonist. It seems he did not like being told what to draw in the AP bullpen and took the opportunity to strike out on his own. This implies he had been doing AP cartoons after the war as well, although I did not see a lot of them.

Unfortunately, although the art remains as fresh and captivating as ever, on his own his political power was decidedly less. As a conservative man in conservative times, he had very little to atttack. Most of his cartoons are illustrations of popular opinions rather than a specific attack on a point. Like saying the Britsh are descending into socialism (with 'our' money even), without giving specific examples. He also seemed to have a thing about taxes being too high all the time and every december every other cartoon seems to have been about drunk driving accidents around Christmas. But the art is so pretty and sharp. And , as I said, the lettering is a pleasure to behold.

I am not certain yet how long Barrow stayed at the World-Herald. It may even have been until his retirement. I will dive further into this rabbithole and show you some more later.

The Case of The Missing Dalies

Saturday Leftover Day.

The Perry Mason newspaper strip was a short run affaire in the early fifties. Erle Stanley Gardner's detective hero had been a huge succes in the forties, helped by the writer's habit of prepublishing each new book in serealized form in various weekly magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post. The newspaper version was drawn by an Charles A. Lofgren, an unknown artist about whom I could not find a lot of information. On December 17 Mel Keefer took over with a new story. He continued the strip (unsigned) in a Alex Raymond inspired style until March 23. After that, a young Frank Thorne took over, fresh out of art school. He too adopted a Alex Raymond style, though his version was slightly more slickly inked than the scratchier Keefer. Thorne signed the strip and continued it until it's demise later that year, all the while developing his style.

I showed one of Lofgren's full stories in Sunday only version in an earlier post and I have various dailies and Sundays in other posts. But Perry Mason is a strip to be read, not only seen. So here is a longer run of Longren, going into the Mel Keefer months. I have a couple of those as well, but galfway through you will see it changes to Sundays only. The Sundays cover the handover to Thorne and I finish out his first story in Sunday only version as well.

Not the best quality (all these strips are clipped from a microfiche newspaper site), but in lieu of a real full color reprint it must serve as the only record of this forgotten but near really all that bad early crime strip.