Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Hardly Brothers

Wednesday Advertising Day.

Rusty and Dusty is another of those long running ad strips of the forties and fifties. New episodes seem to have been produced every two weeks from somewhere in early 1949 to at least 1956. I had shown a couple of later samples earlier, which I have incorporated in this post. After that I held on to my earlier samples, because I still don't know who drew this series. I don't even now if it was done by one artist or if the original artist waas replaced. I do think the earlier strips show some sign of Lou Fine's style, but I think he had other and better accounts at that time. Later on the strips got a bit more rushed, but if that is due to a change in artost of just a change in the amount of money and effort spend on the strips, I am not sure. Anyway, it was a remarkable series and I am glad to be able to show so many color and black and white samples.

Some of these strips also have The Trouble Twins attached to them, which famously is the strip that got Dik Browne the assignment to do Hi and Lois. Only the samples here are from 1955 and 1956, when Hi and Lois was already running. They could still be by Browne, though, who does not seem to have given up all his advertising work when he got the strip account.

Feb 13 1949:


July 24 1949:


March 12 1950:


Date unknown 1950:


Sept 29 1951:


Feb 17 1952:


March 17 1952:


April 13 1952:


Sept 7 1952:


Oct 5 1952:


Nov 2 1952:


June 7 1953:


July 7 1953:


Aug 8 1954:


Nov 11 1954:


Jan 30 1955:


Feb 27 1955:


May 22 1955:


July 10 1955:


Oct 9 1955:


June 3 1956:


Aug 16 1956:

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

New From Bloggo

Tuesday Comic Strip Day.

Today, I am sharing an early Sunday comic strip from 1920, which I find interesting not only for historians. Hawkshaw the Detective started his life as Sherlocko, an obvious parody of Sherlock Holmes. I guess this is the strip that influenced the Marx Brothers to take ficticious names ending in -o, like Groucho, Harpo, Chico and such. I have awhoe bunch of Sunday pages with this strip waiting to be scanned in, but when I came across this clear run of almost black and white pages, I just couldn't resist. Unfortunately, I have taken these scans from two different papers and it is only after putting them up here, I have found out that they don't always match. it seems bot papers didn't always publish the right Sunday on the right date (althoug sometimes they did), so there is at least one double and therefor one missing...





















Monday, March 29, 2010

Two Single Images

Monday Cartoon Day.

Last week the third season of 'my' comedy series S1ngle started on the Dutch Net 5 network. I put the possessive pronoun between quotes, because these things ar always done together with other people and in this case, this is particulary true. S1ngle was already a succesful newspaper strip when my writing partner Wim Bax suggested that I should use my 25 year old relationship with it's authors Hanco Kolk and Peter de Wit to turn it into a television series. Wim and I devised a concept and took it to the producer, FourOne Media, who suggested we team up with producer/director and former casting mogul Job Gosschalk. Job took on the project as a showrunner, delivered a great cast and in the end directed 28 of the 32 episodes. He also lead us in plotting the series, after which Wim wrote the episodes and I suggested rewrites. When I got ill last year Job and Wim took over completely and finished off the series while I was living it up in hospital. So to say that I am now watching the episodes with mixed feelings is an understatement. I am feeling pride for the accomplishments of everyone involved, humbleness (if there is such a word), joy at the success of it all and an intense desire not to talk about it too much.

This week, it was also announced that the series will be running on the new Sixx network in Germany and that negotiations are underway to bring the serie to America. Like Net 5, Sixx is a network aimed at females and it wouldn't surprise me if S1ngle wound up on Lifetime on of these days.

To celebrate, I have here the first two pages of a six page article Hanco Kolk did for a Dutch weekly. It shows off the series and the three actrices playing the main characters as well as Hanco's wonderful style. The other pages told the story of how the series was sold, but they were a bit more difficult to translate without ruining the art (which is also why I let the Dutch head of the article intact). I still might do so at a later date, if only to show Hanco's sympathetic caricatures of me, Job and Wim.


Sunday, March 28, 2010

Taking It Slow

Sunday Quick Fix.

I am usually to busy in the weekends to do a lot of commentary, but after reading this week's installment of Mort Meskin's Johnny Quick (from Adventur Comics #129), I have to remark how great this period of Meskin's art is. I know that Joack Kirby is hailed as one of the big action artists of his generation and he certainly did fight sequences like noone, but panel for panel I think there are very few comics around this time that have so much well orchestrated action in them... except maybe Jack Cole's Plastic Man. So many comics then and now) were little more than people standng around and talking. Here the story goes from action sequence to action sequence. It almost makes you wonder what the script must have loked like.