Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Woofday Adverwoofing

Wednesday Advertising Day.

Sam Cobean was a wonderful and well respected cartoonist, who dies too young. He was one of the few cartoonists who worked for the sophisticated New Yorker and for the more bourgeois Saturday Evening Post/Colliers crowd. Although he did a couple of books during his lifetime, a lot of his gags remain unreprinted and that's a shame. Like most popular cartoonists of his period (early postwar) he did a lot of advertising as well, with just as much result. I think the Ken-L series survived his death in the early fifties. In a world where cartoon cats are everywhere, his dogs are refreshing.



Pre Mole

Tuesday Comic Strip Day.

I have been slowly scanning all of my pretty large collection Sunday Jacky's Diary strips by Jack Mendelsohn. This delightful and funny strip from the late fifties and early sixties is a prime example of what I love about the comedy and newspaper strips of that period. It is intelligent, welldrawn and satirical in the oldfashioned sense of the word - pointing out negatives and discrepensies in the world around us without tearing it down. Today we often sperate the negative and the positive, but these guys knew how to combine it.

Anyway, I shouldn't have bothered, because Craig Yoe prouced a beautiful reprinting of all the Sunday strips with the help of Mr. Mendelsohn, who is still with us and runs a very informative website about his career. As usual, Craig has added an opening article that tells you all you need to know about Jack Mendelsohn and his career and I highly recommend it, as I do all of Craigs books. You can buy it at Amazon for under $30.


Monday, April 28, 2014

Spooky Hollow

Monday Cartoon Day.

Apart from doing the Sunday Smokey Stover and Spooky strips, Bill Holman also did a series of daily cartoons for a long time. It was called Nuts and Jolts and featured his trademark goofy humor.

Sunday, April 27, 2014

Must Be Meskin

Sunday Meskin Measures.

In the late forties and early fifties Mort Meskin worked for Standard doing some of his career best work with Jerry Robinson. Because of that reason I also keep an eye out for any other Standard books from that period. He is already known to have done some work for Thriling Comics and Real Life Comics in the same period. Recently the Digital Comics Museum uploaded another free book from the collection of Jim Vandeboncoeur Jr., which as always included his handwritten notes (from when he worked out who id what with fellow comics historian James Ware). And indeed, in Thrilling Romances #5 he notes not one but three stories by Meksin. One is a half page filler, the other a two pager,also filler material. The third is more problematic. It is noted by Jim to be by Mort Meskin and Pierce Rice. At times the work of Pierce Rice looks like that of Meskin, probably mostly because of a similar approach to their drawing rather then a likeness in style. But here it looks like neither to me, apart from a couple of feint but obvious traces of Meskin's style on page 5. Which makes the rest of the story all the more infuriating. The shorst are pure Meskin heaven, though.

Saturday, April 26, 2014

Hollywood Babble On

Saturday Leftover Day.

Bill Dyers style wasn't really suited for the more adventurous daily adventures of Patsy in Hollywood, even though he drew them from 1948 tp somewhere in the midfifties. But it was just rigth for the more humorous Sunday page. I have a few color samples, which I shared earlier and I wisg I ha dmore. Instead, here are some black and white scans I pulled from some online newspaper myself. Including one of those Modern Arf gags my friend Craig Yoe likes so much.