I Don't Know Much

Thursday Story Strip Day.

I do not like using the images from Google News Search too much, since they are often grey or blurry. But I seem to be having some sort of fill in week, with all sorts of strips I couldn't find from any other source.

I have been showing as much as possible of Dan Heilma's run of his first big newspaper strip The American Adventure. The basis for this a near complete self scanned run of his color Sundays. With those, I tried to find the dailies, so you can read the story. Apparently, in my first post I missed the first couple of weeks of this interesting early history strip. So here they are, complete with the first Sundays, I did not have in my collection. If you want to read the whole thing, use the labels. This weekend I will add these to the complete run as well.

Browne Tea

Wednesday Advertising Day.

I like the advertising strips Dik Browne did for Lipton Tea and showed all I could find in a longer post some time ago. My run started in July 1949 and went on to somewhere into 1952 once a month. Recently, I found four more from an even earlier period. They are from Google News search and not all the Sundays were there, but they show there were at least six more than I thought.

That also means I can go and try and fill the holes in this series and maybe do a comlete run this weekend. Or you can follow the label to see more (and in color).

 Toot-toot!

Tuesday Comic Strip Day.

Tallking about Popeye (as I was yesterday), here are some of Bud Sagendorf's earliest Popeye Sundays. Sagendorf started out as Segar's apprentice and assistant. When he didn't get to take over the strip after Segar died, he went on to do the comic book (very succesfully, I may add), which was repacked a couple of years ago by Craig Yoe (very succesfull I may add) and lead to a new Popeye comic book written (very succesfully, I may add) by Roger Langridge and a Sagendorf reprint series (very... well, you know by now).

In 1960 Sagendorf finally took over the newspaper strip and made it into an even bigger succes than it already was. Of course, the television series may have helped - but Sagendorf's funny stories and handling of the characters didn't hurt. So succesful was he, that his early years almost seem forgotten. Like the early years of B.C. and Beetle Bailey and The Wizard if Id and Hi and Lois, Popeye became such a fixture in the newspapers that the older stuff was sort of forgotten until it looked, wel... older.

But in Sagendorf's case, that was not a bad thing. Of course I'd say it wasn't in any of the strips mentioned, but young fans may argue that the older Beetle doesn't look like the new one and that the first year or so of B.C. was a bit unsure. But in Sagendorf's case, his style was fully set when he took over the newspaper strip, so the only thing that is different about them is the fact that newpaper strips were bigger than and had more room for witty gags and funny drawings. So, like, I'd say they are better.

Here are some Sunday cliplets for you to make up your own mind. If and when I have more color samples I'll share them. The crude scans (as the comics reporter calls them are the result of the fact that these were taken from a microfiche source. I have just recieved a huge load of color Sundays which I will upload as soon as I have scanned them.

That's Al I Got

Monday Cartoon Day.

No post on Monday, becaue I was actually preparing a larger run of Tall Tales Sunday for over the Christmas holidays. While you are looking forward to that, here are some more daily samples (plus a reminder that more can be found if you follow the label).

To make the post longer and more interesting... if you are in the Vermont area, it might be worth your while to visit the Center of Cartoon Studies in White River Junction for an exhibition of newspaper cartoon samples done by Mr. Jaffee in the early fifties. As you can see from the snapshots, his work in that time is remarkable. This is when he was still doing Patsy Walker for Stan Lee, but apparently he was already trying to get out.

The exhibition is not given a lot of media attention because it is primarily set up for Jamer Sturm's students at the Center, but hey... who wouldn't want to see that. I hope one day, some of these will find pride of place in some sort of seminal work on Mr. Jaffee's career. Which I wouldn't mind writing, after meeting with him last month. But Gary Groth is probably already working on it...


November 2 – December 6

Location:
The Center for Cartoon Studies Gallery
94 South Main Street
White River Junction, Vermont

Gallery hours:
Fridays, 12-5pm
Saturdays 10am-2pm

And here is one of Mr. Jaffee's most recent drawings. I was skying with Craig Yoe and we were making plans to visit Al when I came over, when he told me Al was going to do a Variant cover for the succesful Roger Langridge written Popeye book and he was looking for a gag - would I know any. I wnt to my collection of Timely comics and picked several Patsy Walkers with funny Al Jaffee covers and wrote some variations on the situations. One of those was picked by Al and will be featured as a Variant cover of the new Popeye #9.

And the cover it was based on...

The Secret's Out!

Sunday Meskin Measures.

The second Mark Merlin story. Here we see Meskin develoing his own minimalistic style, in it's own way as impressive as Alex Toth's - although maybe just a little bit less daring.