Tuesday, April 30, 2013

What Did You Do, Daan?

Tuesday Comic Strip Day.

As well known as Dutch Disney artist Daan Jippes is, his short runs as artist on the Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck strips in the eighties is pretty scarce. Especiall the Mickey Mouse run in late 1981 and 1982. I know it, becaue it ran on the back of the Dutch Donald Duck weekly, but I have never seen any color samples of the actual Sundays. The Mickey Mouse strip was pretty badly dispributed at that time and it was a wonder they even kept it alive. Here is a couple of months worth in pretty bad condition. Wat survives will illustrate what an impression these made when I first saw them in 1982.




































Monday, April 29, 2013

Limited Engagement

Monday Cartoon Day.

For a short time in the midfifties Charles Addams had a weekly cartoon series in the newspapers. He came from a rich tradition of magazne cartoons, but his outlook was unikely dark. Unfortunately, so are these microfiche copis...









Sunday, April 28, 2013

Out of Orbit

Sunday Meskin Measures.

Last week I showed a story from The Westerner that has always been identified as a rare Mort Meskin story, even though on closer inspection his involvement seemed small. Four years later Meskin again did a story for Orbit, this time for their crime title Wanted (#45). And again it seems that his actual involvement is not very large, although probably more than on the Westerner story. In most pasrts it is very clear that Meskin worked on this story. But still, there is something wrong. If you compare this to the work Mesking was doing at the time at Prize, most of the figures are much too dteailed. Mort Meskin was a very impressionistic artist, using the minimum of lines to construct his figures. Jim Vandeboncoeur, identifies this story as being by Meskin and Roussos, which to me means pencilled by Meskin and inked by Roussos. As it happened there were a couple ofMeskin/Roussos stories in the early Tmely/Atlas books ad they look nothing like thta. Mort Meskin pencilled very light and George Roussos inker very heavily. Roussos also had a few inking tricks that are missing here, the half blacked out faces and the chicken wire crosshatching on shadows. Instead this looks like it was pencilled by a whole diffeent artis and inked by Meskin. Who this artis would be and why Meskin would take on such a job when he was up to his ears in work for Prize and other companies, I don't know.









Saturday, April 27, 2013



Saturday Leftover Day.

Have you got the IDW Terry and the Pirates reprint series? I still have to read the last one (fially a strip that is as much fun to read as to look at), so I hadn't come across this one. An illustration blog I flllow has a feature called 'one perfect drawing'. This is my entry for 'one perfect Sunday'.



And another one that comes a month before that.

Friday, April 26, 2013

Eye Be Poppin' You

Friday Comic Book Day.

A couple of months ago I showed some Popeye pages. Belgian comic artist Tom Bouden contacted me. He wanted to try and make a proposal for IDW to see if he could draw their new Popeye series. He had a couple of story ideas and I suggested taking one and doing it as a seven page back-up story. IDW was using different artists for these back-ups and although most of them were written by Roger Langridge (whom I follow and admire for all of his work) we sort of hoped that even he wouldn't do this forever. Turns out it was the series itself that didn't live forever. When we had finished enough of the story to present it, the book had been cancelled. Recently Tom reminded me that I wanted to show the results here as well. Since Popeye is copyright free in Europe (although not in the US) I think we are alright on that front as well.

So here is our little story. We worked on it 'Marvel style', with me doing the story synopsis based on Tom's outline, Tom doing the art and me doing the dialogue. Tom has also done a lovely little four page Swee-pea story on his own, which I will share as soon as I have checked with Tom if that's alright.

NB: I had the pencilled verson up here, but I didn't know I had the inked version al along!
NB2: For those of you coming here from The Comic Journal, I just put up another, even weirder story.















Thursday, April 25, 2013

Calling Doc Martin

Thursday Story Strip Day.

I came across a nice representable selection of Sunays from Richard Fletcher's Surgeon Stone. Several 'quite interesting facts' about that ('quite interesting' being the term for the sort of nerdy knowledge that would be too obscure even for a room full of comic geeks): Richard Fletcher is not Richard Fletcher. There is a lot of confusion about that. Richard Martin Fetcher was an artist from the Chicago area that did a history strip in the fifties called Jed Cooper, American Scout. Richard Eugene 'Rick' Fetcher was a slightly younger artist who did a history strip in the fifties called Old Glory Story. Both worked in a style that was influenced by Milt Caniff. The only difference being that Richard Martin Fletcher started out with a different style and Richard Eugene Fletcher ddn't change his style until after Old Glory Story, when he started assisting Chester Gould on Dick Tracy. Actually, I was quite surprised to see that the early samples of Surgeon Stone, Richar Martin Fletcher's first regular comic strip from the forties, were in a style totally unrelated to Milt Caniff. I had only seen some originals from his later period (which I have uncluded here) which show more of a Caniff influence. So much, that I would probaby want to include Surgeon stone in my proposed book on the 'School of Caniff'. Surgeon Stone ran for four years and was a Sunday only.

BY the way, looking at the originals I fear Fletcher may have picked up another trick from Milt Caniff - the panels in the color samples I have seem to have been cut to make them shorter. Caniff did that with his dalies... to the same deplorable effect.