Tuesday, May 31, 2011

A Bugg In A Rug

Wednesday Advertising Day.

Monday I said that that day's subject Bob Bugg never had a strip of his own. But he almost sort ofdid, actually. And I have shown some of those earlier. In the late fifties he did a two weekly Sergeant Bilko strip for Camels cigarettes. I have almost the complete run of those and one say I will get around to scanning them all in and making a complete run of it here. For now you will have to do with just a couple more. If you like them, you can follow the tag to see others. Including one in black and white that I have in color here. The one tier version sis a new oddity that I had never seen before. I don't know if it was a cut down version of a normal one or especially made. My guess is the former.

Camels apparently used an advertising agency that liked doing newspaper comic ads. Their run of ads from the earlier fifties with celebrity endorsements is famous and I have a couple more of those as well. Again, their are more if you follow the link.

Inbetween those two series, in the mid-fifties, they did a short run of a more comical series drawn by Dik Browne (with or without help of Gill Fox). These represent some of Browne's funniest and best drawn advertising work and seemed to have gone on even after he started Hi and Lois and 'left' advertising. Again, there is more in previous posts.







Hey, it's Arnold!

Tuesd Comic Strip Day.

Last week, I showed a couple of March Sundays from a satirical little strip I had never seen before, called Arnold. It turns out to have been a Sunday only strip, that started life as a college newspaper strip and which ran for only a couple of months. All I know about the strip and the artist comes from the announcing article from January 4th. I went back to my sourse and am proud to show you every Sunday of the short run of this strip. This is not all, of course. Over at The Stripper's Guide blog some commenter said he had seen the strip as a daily in the Ithaca college Newspaper. There is a color version of the top tier of the June 25 Sunday at the Dutch Lambiek website, which must come from another paper. And all the Sundays shown here except for one are two tier versions of what obviously was a three tier strip. All that remiand is to hope that either the artist or one of his reletives is still alive and tell us a little bit more about what might possibly be the first college newspaper strip to get national syndication.


































Monday, May 30, 2011

Snugg as a Bugg

Monday Cartoon Day.

Bob Bugg was a great magazine illustrator in the modern style. He started around the same time as Hank Ketcham, maybe a bit later. You can see they are of the same generation. I may have shown these Thiw Week pieces before, but they were in my 'yet to show' folder. He worked well into the sixties, as you can see, with The American Weekly as one of his regular clients. As far as I can tell, he never had a gagstrip or a panel of his own until late in his career, when he did New Neighbours. By then his style was 'old hat' but we can now see it as all part of the work of a major talent.