Friday, September 05, 2014

Return To The West

Thursday Story Strip Day.

As long as we are doing westerns, I am reposting one of the prime sets of scans from my collection, a long and almost complete run of Ray Bailey's Vesta West. I didn't want to repost, actually, but I forgot I had already done so. My bad, hope sme of you will see it for the first time.

Vesta West was started by Fred Maegher for the Chicago Comic Boook section, a Sunday section you could fold into an oblong half sized 'comic book'. Although it had some established favorites, most of the strips were especially created for it, including Mr. Ex by Walt Whitman (and later Bernard Baily). I have shown earlier samples of Vesta West before and together they show Ray Bailey (who took over from Maegher after a few months) looking for a style. In 1943 he had joined Milton Caniff's studio and it shows. By this time, the half size comic book was changing and Vesta West was now filling a small comic book tabloid page as a 'normal' strip.

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