Going Rogue

Thursday Story Strip Day.

WE all 'know' George Wunder's Terry and the Pirates was no where near as good as Milton Caniff's original version. But how many of you have actually read a longer sretch of the strip. Here is your chance. A month long sequence from October 1952.

See If You Can Walk A Mile After This

Wednesday Ad Strip Day.

One of the longer running comic strip as campaigns was Camels celebrity endorsment series. Popular figures from tv, movies and radio lent their visage for a comic strip endorsement. Alsways easier than turning up in person. This series went on all through the forties and into the sixties and is a favorite amog collectors because of the celebrity conection. I have many mre coorsamles unscanned, but there at least one among this batch of forties samples. The artist is unknown to me and doesn't bear the hallmarks of one of the Johnstone and Cushing regulars.

Dec 5 1953;


Dec 17 1944:


Jan 20 1946:


May 25 1947:


Date unknown 1947:


Aug 3 1947:


Jan 11 1948:


May 9 1948:


Aug 3 1948:


Sept 12 1948:


As a bonus I am adding a couple of new loose ends from my microfiche collection.

June 14 1953 - I used to think this was by Gill Fox, but I am less sure now:


April 15 1951 - could be by any of the Johnstone and Cushing regulars:


A new samples of Jack Betts'Peter Pain from dec 28 1948:

Tall and Tan and Young and Lovely

Tuesday Comic Strip Day

In one of the interviews surrounding the release of the Tall Tale book, Al Jaffee mentioned that laer on in the run he was forced by the editors of the Herald Tribune to add dialogue to his daily gags. In his opinion it really hurt the strip, which essentially was a silent gag panel. Even though the jokes didn't seem to suffer, it sure didn't help his overseas sales. The strip ended somewhere in early 1964. Since I am waiting to do some more color scans for this strip, here are a couple of those later dailies, accompaied by some more black and white samples of the Sunday.

May 26 1963:


June 29 1963:


Somewhere in 1964:


Jan 6 1963:


Jan 13 1963:


Jan 27 1963:


Feb 3 1963:


Feb 24 1963:


March 3 1963:


March 10 1963:


March 17 1963:


March 24 1963:


March 31 1963:


May 12 1963:


July 5 1963:


July 12 1963:


June 16 1963:

Gluyas Of Life

Monday Cartoon Day

Some more Gluyas Williams cartoons from the forties, if only to allow me the worst title pun ever.

Jan 1/15 1940:

So Fast It's A Blur

Sunday Quick Fix

Not the best of scans this time, but you can still see that the splash pages for this feature are getting better every month.

Sunday Check-up.

Halfway through yesterday's post I ran out of room on my account at blogger. Since it only cost about $6 to get plenty more I buckled down and paid. Afterwards I saw that I had to wait 24 hours for the new room to be added. Even though it is now more than 24 hours later, nothing has been added as of yet. So I guess I will have to keep you waiting, too.

Two days later still nothing. I am afraid I will have to go online and find out what I did wrong or what went wrong. They did manage to take the money, though. Good news... I just recieved about six or eight new Sundays with Tall Tales in full color. And I still had a few waiting to be scanned.

Three days later I found out I had to log in at Google and fixed it. First off, I will be adding a couple more images to the previous post.

Ger

King Kent

Saturday Leftover Day.



Today I did my orders from the October, November and December Previews catalogues, which I had nor been able to do when I was in hospotal. I was struck by the amount of great books IDW is adding to it's catalogue. Not only am I eagerly awaiting their Rip Kirby book, but they have now added a reprint of Bringing Up Father from the forties (the graphicly most interesting years whoch would we would have to wait for for decades if they had started reprinting from the strips start in the twenties), Bill Keane's family circus (which most people remember as a pretty dull strip, but Keane was a very good and funny cartoonist, so I am looking forward to the first years of this famiy perannial) and lo and behold, they are going to do Jack Kent's delightfully whimsical King Aroo. The first book will contain Sundays and daileis from the first two years. This means I can now unload all the spotty samples I have from those years. If you order the book, you will be able to read the stories of this Pogo-like, but much more gentle strip... and in better quality than these micro-fiche copies. I have also added a scan of one of my many later samples of this strip.

July 17 1951:


Jan 16 1952:


Jan 22 1962:


Feb 9 1952:


Feb 16 1952:


Feb 23 1952:


Feb 25 1952:


Feb 26 1952:


Feb 27 1952:


Feb 28 1952:


Feb 29 1952:


March 2 1952:


March 4 1952:


March 9 1952:


April 5 1952:


April 12 1952:


april 19 1952:



May 1 1952:


Feb 27 1955:

You Can Call Me Joe

Friday Comic Book Day.

When Joe Kubert and Norman Maurer's three dimension adventures went belly-up at St. John's they parted ways and had to find their own means to earn a living. Kubert eventually ended up at DC and did very well there, but for a while he did all sorts of things. Like most of his contemporaries he first went to Stan Lee's Timely, but he didn't do a lot of work there. Maybe he didn't think they paid enough or maybe he knew he was going to get work at DC pretty early on. His work for Timely falls into three periods. In the first period, he did a couple of jobs as an inker for an artist called Al Gordon. Godon was a pretty mediocre artist, who may have been a beginner at that point. Laer in the fifties he did some solo jobs for Charlton and other companies, but none of them had the quality of the Kubert-inked stories. The amount of inking Kubert did varies from story to story and all of them are signed Gordon. But on the first one Kubert's style almost obliterates Gordon's and I would have no hesitation calling it a pure Kubert story if it wasn't signed Al Gordon. But here's the kicker: the signature seems to have been done by Kubert as well. The name is inked with a brush in a circle in the same way and same letering Kubert used for his own signature. Maybe Kubert was oing Gordon a favour or maybe he was using him as a way to get in touch with Stan Lee (although he must have know he would get work the moment he walke in). I would love to ask Kubert himself about this rather mysterious Al Gordon (no relation to the later inker of the same name), but well into his eighties he seems to be more interested in creating new stories than revisiting old ones. After that Kubert did a couple of stories with later sf writer Sam Moskowitz. In this case Kubert pencilled and Moskowitz inked. His inking stle completely changed the look of Kubert's work, but strangely enough that's when he starts signing his pages. Normally the assignment of inkers was done by Lee, but here I get the distinct impresion the choice was Kubert's and he was helping out someone he knew. If Kubert brought in pencils, why else would Lee assign every story to a novice inker, who completely changed Kubert's look?

I am showing the first Gordon/Kubert story here and have added the list of work by Kubert from the magnificent Timely/Atlas website Atlas Tales. With the help of the art spotting talents of the Yahoo Timely/Atlas group (lead by the imcomperable Doc Vasallis) Greg has compiled an almost complete list of all stories done by this company that we later have come to know as Marvel. It is a work in progress and full attributions are not added until there is agreement from several people, but it is still one of the most reliable and fun comic book resourceson the web. I have also added the list of Gordon's work and it surprised me to see that stories that I think show signs of Kubert's inking have in fact just been assigned to Gordon. I would certainly have added a Kubert? attribution to them. I am also showing to of the splash pages Atlas Tales have added. The first shows Kubert's hand in the way the explosions are inked. The second has Kubert's textures. But still, afer that first tale, his contribution became a lot less.

F-337 The Hog! Journey Into Mystery 21 4 pages Jan 1955 [Kubert]
F-561 The Vanishing Lady Uncanny Tales 28 5 pages Jan 1955 [Kubert]
F-425 S-2 Strikes Battle 37 6 pages Feb 1955 [Kubert]
F-596 The Man Who Vanished! Journey Into Unknown Worlds 34 5 pages Apr 1955 [Kubert]
F-735 Pony Express Apache Kid 13 5 pages Apr 1955 Kubert? (my own attribution)
F-875 The Strange Ones Marvel Tales 134 4 pages May 1955 [Kubert]/[Moskowitz]
F-943 Man With a Gun Kid Colt Outlaw 48 5 pages May 1955 Kubert/Moskowitz
F-973 To Catch a Thief Western Outlaws 9 pages 6 pages Jun 1955 Kubert/Moskowitz
F-1000 Captured by the Reds! Battle 41 6 pages Jul 1955 Kubert/Moskowitz
G-150 Counter-Attack! Marines in Battle 7 pages 6 Aug 1955 Kubert/Moskowitz
G-446 Marine Raid on Munda Marines in Battle 8 6 pages Oct 1955 [Kubert]/Unknown
G-303 Capt. Kirk of the Infantry War Comics 38 6 pages Nov 1955 Kubert/Moskowitz\

E-35 Keep Out Marvel Tales 122 5 pages Apr 1954 Gordon/Kubert?
E-142 Two-Gun Kid 14 5 pages Jun 1954 Gordon
E-922 Kid Colt Outlaw 38 5 pages Jun 1954 Gordon
E-122 Wild Western 34 5 pages Jun 1954 Gordon
E-758 Darkness! Battlefront 22 6 pages Aug 1954 Gordon
E-619 Redman's Revenge Western Outlaws 4 5 pages Aug 1954 Gordon
E-836 The Man Who Shot Jesse James World's Greatest Songs 1 2 pages Sep 1954 Gordon
E-856 South Of Kot'ri! Battle Action 13 5 pages Oct 1954 Gordon

Buckle Up

Thursday Story Strip Day.

For story day I have a less than complete set of Buck O'Rue strips from dec 1951, but I don't think the Paul Murray fans will mind. Paul Murray was one of the more recognizable artists in the Disney comic books. Lots of people remember him from his Mickey Mouse and Goofy adventures. For Buck O'Rue he teamed up with Disney writer, cartoonist and later Mickey Mouse Club favorite Roy Williams. There is more if you follow the tag.

I'm Just Here For The Movies

Wednesday Advertising Day.

In the late forties some movie company (I believe RKO) started doing newspaper comic strip ads for some of their movies. I don't now if they were initiated by a publicity department or by a specific producer but there wete quite a few of them and I have tried to show as many of them as I could find, bith in color (selfscanned) and in black and white (from microfche). Recentl I came across two more that were done in 1959 and 1962, which I thought I'd share as well. To round out today's movie theme I am including some scattered dalies from a strip which seems to have been based on the very funy vaudeville movie Helzapoppin, or at least on the succesful stage version that preceded the movie. It is signed by the big names behind Hellzapoppin' and drawn by the cartoonist George Swanson, who did the family strip The Flop Family form 1943 until his death in 1981 in this same oldfashioned style.

Oct 29 1959;


Jan 6 1962:


June 17 1942:


June 24 1942:


Nov 10 1942;


NOV 27 1942: