Monday, September 30, 2013

Toot-toot!

Tuesday Comic Strip Day.

For years Popeye was best known for the newspaper strip drawn by Bud Sagendorf. Comic strip historians had to stress their relative unimportance to make people aware of the beauty of the original version by Elsie Segar. Then Craig Yoe helped us rediscover Sagendorf by publishing a book with his comic book work from the fortie and fifties (stressing the point that Sagendorf started out as an assistant of Segar and had lost his rightfull place as his successor by syndicate shenanigans. And indeed the comic book version is great to look at and very much in the spirit of the old Popeye. The book spawned a comic book series from IDW, which in turn has led to a succesfull series of book reprints of the comic books. But now it is time to rediscover the early newspaper years of Segar. As with most strips that died down and we homogenized in the seventies and eighties, the early years are much more exciting. Sagendorf started doing the newspaper strip in Augustus 1959 and the Sunday in September of the same year. Here are some of his Sundays in color which I scanned from my own collection.





Angel Without Wings

Monday Cartoon Day.

Angel by Mel Casson ran longer than I thought. What let it down in the end was not the Hank Ketcham derivated art, but the second Hand Dennis the Menace jokes, which literally read like rejects from Dennis writers.

Sunday, September 29, 2013

The Criming Game

Sunday Meskin Measures.

Another late period Prize story from Headline #67, just because I came across it.







I also cme across this one, an unsigned Mort Meskin story from Timely's Love Romances #44. It is noted in the Mort Meskin Checklist that's available from the Mort MeskinYahoo group, but not on the Timely Atlas Tales site. It is a special story, because it is one of the few solo jobs Meskin did for Stan Lee. Most of the others were done with George Roussos and signed MR. This story is from Mort Meskin's most fertile period in the fifties, when he was doing horror stories for Frankenstein and psychological stories for Strange Worlds of Your Dreams. He also tried to make the step to DC, where the standards (and payments) were the highest in the business. And where they would tinker with his personal style so much, that only the internal brilliance of his work survived.

The Day Joe Died

Friday Comic Book Day.

If Marvel is ever going to reprint some of their older western books, they will (and should) start with Jack Kirby's work in the late fifties and early sixties in the genre. But allthough the stories were lightweight (often written by Stan Lee himself) a lot of capable artists worked on them, from John Severin and George Tuska to Gene Colan, Al Williamson, Doug Wildey, Ross Andru and even Jack Davis. Davis joined the company as a free-lancer towards the summer of 958, when Stan Lee was slowly rebuilding it from the 1957 distribution debacle we have come to know as The Atlas Implosion. Eventhough Jack Kirby has repeated many times the story that Stan Lee was putting all his stuff in boxes when he came in to save them with his monster books (and two years later the superheroes), Tom Lammers has shown in his excellent book Tales of the Atlas Implosion, that Lee and owner Goodman had been rebuilding slowly from late 1957 onwards. In fact, the first 'new' titles started to appear as soon as two months after the collapse of their distributor (which forced them to make a deal with competitor DC owned distributor National and drasticly lower the number of books they brought out). Jack Kirby didn't come in until June or July, the precise date of which is still a hot debate among Timely/Atlas scholars (which is to say, most don't buy my theory that Kirby came in the week Atlas workhorse Joe Maneely died to see if there was work to be had). Using the job numbers and ledgers of artists such as Dick Ayers to determine the rough sequence of events but not to the day.

Although... top Timely Atlas expert Michaeel Vassello (check out his Timely Atlas essayblog) has almost proven that the last piece of art that was on Joe Maneely's table on the day he died might have been the second Two Gun Kid story for Two Gun Kid #45. The job number is T-067 and that in itself makes it one of the last things he did. Furthermore, Maneely only did the splash page and he rst of the story was finished by Jack Davis, who also did the first story of the book - which, judging by the job number was only written after that. The only other candidate for Joe maneely's last job seems to be the illustation which was used a the cover of Two Gun Kid #49. The story that goes with it, was ritten a lot later (judging by the job number) and drawn by John Severin. It all depend on which one you think Joe Maneely would have done first. If he even did that cover on that day. It looks as if Stan slapped on a title and wrote the story after that, so the drawing could have been done any time.

Joe maneely died by falling between two metro trins on the way home. For a long time it was silently thought by many that a night of drinking with the friends was the cause of it, sometimes even leading to rumors of alcoholism. Stan Goldberg recently came out with the forgotten story that Joe maneely didn't have his glasses that day, which is much more likely to have been the cause of the accident. Which means that he must have drawn these pages without his glasses, so he must have been farsighted...