Boxing Day

Sunday Repeat Performance.

I reformatted another month of Big Ben Bolt Sundays, a combination which uses the longer art of the two tier and the additional wider art in the first panel and the extra panel in the middle of the half page version. This time they none of them were my own scans and some trickery was necessary. They are added below the ones I showed earlier. More to come.

Even Bigger Ben

Sunday Repeat Performance.

Some weeks ago I shared a Big Ben Sunday, which I had cut together from two different versions, each of which had a different number and size of panels. I saw that I have quite a large run of 1953 and 1954 Sundays in both formats and decided to start doing that to everyone. In some cases, it meant I have to use any kind of material to get the extra panels - even a black and whote version of the thriee tier Sundays. It is not going fast, but here are the first few results. If you want to know more about the proces, use the link to look at the previous entry. This lot includes one full three tier Sunday for which I did not have the corresponding two tier version with added art.

Mix and Match

Saturday Leftover Day

I never scanned Big Ben Bolt from my many newspaper sections when two things happened. Classic Comic Press came out with a book of the first two years of the dailies and I absolutely loved it. I knew the drawing style of John Cullen Murphy was very well, but the storylines were suprisingly good. The whole premise of a boxer trying as a sort of social warrior just works. And it often is a bit messy, certainly for it's time period. The second thing was I got a load of fifties scans from my Dutch co-collector friend Arnaud. I started scanning everything I had for him and keeping them together with his, in the hope one day I would have enough to present whole storylines (which were seperate on the Sundays, so that would work).

But how to present them? As all collectors know Sunday newspaper strips are usually designed to be cut up in various different ways. There is the half page version with three tiers, the classic two tier version made by dropping the first tier and the four tier tab version, usually made by either dropping one small panel on the last place of the half page's first tier (Willy Lumpkin) or the middle panel of the half page second tier (Pogo).

I haven't got an actual sample for Pogo, but you can work it out from this:

But Big Ben Bolt addded a new version. Apart from the half page and the truncated two tier versions, there also was a slightly smaller two tier version that rearranged most panels from the half page and added a bit of drawing to them. I have never seen a tab version, but the panels in this alternative two tier are to elongated to fit into taht (if there ever was one), so the extra drawing must have been especially for this version only. Sinde I have many samples of both versions, I decided to see if I could fit them together in some format and here is the result (with the two seperate scans underneath).

So now I think I will have to do them all that way.

Fighting Chance

Thursday Story Strip Day.

Big Ben Bolt is one of those strips I have been collecting and scanning for a long time, but I keep putting off showing them because I never have a full story. The daily and the Sunday storylines were seperate, so at least that is a lot easier. But still, here is what I have of a storyline in late 1952 and early 1953 and it is hard to follow this incomplete. Still, the art is nice. Another complicating factor is the fact that there are so many different cuts of these Sundays and that each one seems to have some art, the other one hasn't. I have gathered a couple of samples in underneath the color ones here, so you can see for yourself.

Anyway, I hope to find a way around it someday soon. By the way, these particular scans were sent to me by my friend Arnaud, who I met online bidding on the same stuff as I do. He is from Holland too and we seem to have very similar tastes.

Big Bad Boxer

Thursday Story Strip Day.

One of my favorite realistic strips from the fifties is Cullen Murphy's Big Ben Bolt. The problem with showing it here is that I have bits and pieces from all of it's fifteen pieces or so in vairous conditions (ranging from scans I made myself to very badly reproduced stuff from the internet), but almost never a complete story. And although the Sundays and dailies were seperate at least, I can not show any one story complete - which is part of what makes it such a great strip. So here is one, just because it's so pretty.