Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Exploring Every Option

Wednesday Advertising Day.

Let's Explore Your Mind was a long running daily and Sunday feature that answered questions about human behavior in a quiz form running from the thirties into the sixties. The writer, Arthur Wiggam, was the same all the way through, but the art was handled by several artists. Some of these artists are known (and mentioned in Allan Holtz' reference work American Newspaper Comics), but many rmain unknown. I have come across the strip a few time and I always felt that the artist on the strip in the late fifties was someone I should recognize. Sadly even Albert Beccatini (an expert in such matters) did not come up with more than a few names. Looking through my new set of strips to scan it suddenly hit me why I felt I knew this artist. Apart from the oblique Milt Caniff influence, the satirical look and faces reminded me of the work of several better know realistic artits working in some of the Mad magazine imitations from the late fifties and early fifties. At least I have narrowed it down. This style, or something like it, was used by Richard Doxsee, a young artist, who did not seem to have a style of his own yet (at some point he started drawing like Al Williamson and Angelo Torres of EC fame), but when he did satire (in magazines such as Loco and Cracked) he allowed a Jack Davis influence. Similary, the great Joe Maneely (of Timely/Atlas fame) had a similar style when he was doing satire or humor. But the artist whose satiric style would fit this semi-realistic halfbreed the best would be Bernard Baily. Baily was an important artist in the forties and fifties, working for all the big companies, from DC to Marvel and back to DC. His funny work is best visible in the early issues of Cracked (when John Severin was still ne of many artists instead of the one who filled more than half the magazine on his own). The only nagging thing is that he never used those thing tripple lines this artis used for bags under the eyes. I will try and look up a couple of samples from Cracked, but I want to get this thing going again, so here are some of those Explore Sundays in advance.

2 comments:

Ger Apeldoorn said...

Alberto had a look and said he couldn't commit to any artist, but it certainly isn't the same one who did the forties or sixties. I keep doubting about Bernard Baily. At one hand it has some of his traits, on the other the bags under the eyes I mentioned really bother me.

Ger Apeldoorn said...

Well, I found it later on. Look for my other post on Let's Explore and Richard Doxsee (which I accidentally mislabled as Dosxee, so I will have to change that.