Lack of Dawn

Friday Brand New Day. Years ago I acquired a large run of Sundays from the late forties early fifties adventure strip Dawn O'Day by Val Heinz. A remarkable strip about a young model trying to make it in Hollywood, because it started out as a Sunday only and was drawn in a faux Milton Caniff style by an artist who was not known for that before or after. Ir may have been a three tier half page Sunday, but I get the impression it was only ever used as a two tier third. In fact, the originals i am showing here only have the two tiers as well. After a year or so the strip was succesful enough to try out a daily run. But that turned out to be unsustainable, either because of of low sales or because iot just was too much work. Val Heinz had been working as an assistant on Gasoline Alley for Frankj King alongside Bill Perry, who later took over Gasoline Ally altogether. I think he went into advertising and signpainting after Dawn O'Day was discontinued in 1954. Before that, the daily version had stopped and although the earlier Sunday formed a continuity, the later ones were in fact seperate gags. I have shown many samples of my run and have scanned all of them. I am not proud to say a huge number of them are still waiting to be cleaned. But here are a couple of later originals, I picked up elsewhere. With that, i have two announcements from Editor and publisher. One for the start of the Sunday feature and one for the start of the daily. I also have an 1948 article about Heinz, Perry and King.

 

Up To The Toms

Thursday Cowboy Day. 

 Tom Gill was a prolific artist who is mainly known for his work on The Lone Ranger, bioth in newspaper comics and monthly comics. He also had a shorlived modern adventure strip before The Lone Ranger. A year ago, I caollected some of them.

Brick By Brick

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 Wednesday Hobby Day. 

 Morrie Brickman is best known for his 1960's political newspaper strip The Sall Society. I have shown that he started out doing a small kids feature called Pix Trix that you had the fold in a way similar to Al Jaffee's later Mad Fold-In. In between he did this small thing called Do It Yourself. probably meant to be placed on some sort of activities page in the newspaper.

 

Fighting Force

Tuesday Airforce Day. 

The AAFF (American Air Force Features) was a regular comic nespaper that was produced by the Bradbury company to be distributed at US Air Force Bases. It ran from 1955 to 1965 (at least) and had a mix of funny and realistic stories. Some of the artists included in this package were big names from comics and cartoons. I have show most of their work in seperate posts over the years from an incomplete set of micr-fiche issues I found online. The completely forgotten Millie & Terry by Jack Cole (the missing link between his cartoon work and his newspaper comic strip Betsy and Me), Gooch by the marvalous Josh Benton, and strips by Henry Boltinoff, Jack O'Brien, Shelly Moldoff, vic Martin, Ben Wiseman, Mort Drucker and Rogoff (who I suspect was one of the organising talents behind this feature).

What I haven't how yet (or at least I don't think I have) is this set of realistic stories about Air Force Heroes. At one point I was convinced that artist doing most of these was Carl Pfeufer. But after all these years I don't remember where I found that. I have some more realistic stuff after that. The last one is signed by Pete Constanza, who sems a good candidate for the Fighting Heroes as well.