Friday, October 31, 2014

Blowing My Stack

Friday Comic Book Day.

After Mort Meskin did his two Wildcat stories for Sensation Comics, the next few issues the feature was taken over by Gil Stack. An unknown artist, whose style I really liked. Even a bit similar to Meskin. So I looked him up wand was surprised to see that it was in fact a pseudonym for Gil Kane. Just like Gil Kane was a pseudonym for Elia Katz, by the way. But we know him als Gil Kane, so let's stick with that.

Gil Kane was always an impressive artist, but he was never pleased with his own style. Like his name, he changed his image many times. But the graphic genius always came through.


Thursday, October 30, 2014

No Body To Blame

Thursday Story Strip Day.

In the forties and fifties everyone wanted to have a newspaper strip. At least thta's the story we are told time and again. But in fact, there were many artists who had a newspaper strip and left it to do comics. And not just getting cancelled, but actually leaving it for another artist to carry on. One such artists was John Spranger, the former Eisner assistant and Quality artist, who took on the strip Bodyguard with writer (and cartoonist) Lawrence Lariar. After a while the strip was taken over by Carl Pfeufer after which it was renamed The Bantam Prince and ran for quite a while. Now it could be that the tone of the strip had changed so that Spranger was no longer the most suited artist, but my guess is that the sales were not good enough for Spranger to keep on doing it. Which is saying a lot if you know what the earnings were on comic books. At least they had a good run and in the early days the strip didn't even look that bad. A bit like The Saint, which started around the same time and went on to run for all of the fifties.

The One That Made The Camel's Back

Wednesday Advertising Day.

I found on emore Bilko Camels ad by Bob Bugg I didn't yet have and added it to the earlier post.

Here are all I could find. If they were twice a month (as most ads were) and stated and ended at the time of my first and last find, I may actually now have all of them. Lovely stuff.