Tuesday, September 30, 2014

All Aboard!

Tuesday Comic Strip Day.

I have written about this strip before, so I will keep it short. From 1957 Frank Roberge drew a strip about an old lady running a boarding house. There was an old guyplaying caretaker as well and he ater turned out to be her husband or something like that. The strip was full of characters and the setting was a atural. The renters were odd and if they weren't funny enough they coul always be replaced. I found a new source for the strips and will try and show some more, but actually if there ever was a strip that deserved to be collected, it is this one. It was written by Mort Walker and Jerry Dumas and the rest of the Walker Studio team. By 1962, Roberge took over the strip on his own, dropped the boarding house and kept it running for most of the decade as a retirement strip - which was not nearly as funny. But for a short period between 1957 and somewhere early in the sixtes it was one of the funniest strip around, possibly even with a better enemble cast than Beetle Bailey and as far a I am concerned obligatory study material for anyone who wants to do a character driven strip.

One Page Wonders

Monday Cartoon Day.

Before landing the job of his lifetime at Mad, Mort Drucker worked as a comic book artist for several companies. For DC, he seems to have done his first serious work, as the producer of their filler 'fact' pages in several titles. Some of these may even have beendone while he was still on staff as a retoucher. There were more people doing this sort of thing, but I am pretty sure these are all by Mort.

Sunday, September 28, 2014

Love For Sale

Friday Comic Book Day.

These weeks I am selling my Timely romance comics on ebay. My seller name is geapelde. After having collected a large percentage of fifties Timely comics (the company that became Marvel) I have decided to send them back to their country of origin. After a couple of weeks of satisfactory sales, next week I am going to sell met Post-Code Love Romances. even though the pot-code period of romance had less surprises, there ae still a lot of good artists to fid, as you will see below: Vine Colletta, Jay Scott Pike, John Tartaglione, An Brewster, Mike Sekowsky (doing his Alex Toth impression), Reed Crandall, Stan Lee younger brother Larry Lieber in a very early job, lots of att Maker, Tom Scheure and in the later issues jack Kirby, Don Heck and Bob Forgione.