Here We Go-Go Again

I have to clean out my blog folder, so here are some odds and ends.

Saturday Leftover Day.

I am a fan of Bob Powell's work. The last ten years have been almost forgotten by evey historian. He drew a lot for Mad imitation Sick, of course. But when that died down, he had an actual newspaper strip, Teena-a-go-go. I did several posts with dailies and one with all the sundays I could find. I am combining that ast one here with a set of photos of the wash originals and the first Sunday, I missed the first time around. This means I am close to a complete run.

I have shown various Al Hirschfeld cartoons over the years. Recently I shared a couple of gags from Hank Ketcham's It's Only Your Imagination series in True. But he also sometimes illustrated The Saturday Evening Post's You Be The Judge column (as did many others, including Bill Elder).

I am still surprised there is no complete list, website or even book of his work. I keep coming across unknown ones and they are always great. Here is a Bob Hope poster from movie magazine Modern Screen.

 

FanBoys Unite!

Saturday Leftover Day.

Recently I came across these two Bob Powell stories in an issue of Standard's Nightmare. I's a title I mostly know for having a couple of Joe Kubert covers. Like other Standard titles of that period it has art by people such as Alex Toth and George Tuska, but there are lots of other artists as well. Powell was always great on horror stores, expecially suited for weird stuff (which you can see very well on his work for Harvey - both with Howard Nostrand (at the start) as well as solo (later). These two stories here, show how much debt he owed to Will Eisner. Like Eisner (for whom he worked during the war), he tries to avid using normal panel borders. But by doing horror stories, he builds on that in a masterful way. For me, these stories (and a couple more like it) represent the best work of an artist who was never less than very good. Except maybe when inking Jack Kirby in the sixties, which gave him a bad name - but who cares except superhero fanboys?

Inspect Her Gadget

Monday Surprise Me Day.

I have to admit that I have shown samples of today's treat before, but those were only dailies and black and white microfiche scans. Teena-A-Go-Go is the last big project by Bob Powell before he sadly died of cancer in 1967. Writer Bessy Little had been involved with girl magazines from the forties on. She first worked for the teenage and women magazines from Martin Goodman's Timely/Atlas comics, stuff like both the comic book and the magazine version of Miss America. By the early sixties she had become the editor of the popular girls' magazine Teen Life, which was mostly made up with articles and photo features about the popular pop band heroes of the day. Early in she introduced comics to that magazine as well, using Bob Powell for various short stories (one of which, featuring Herman and the Hermits) I have shown here before. She also started the black and white Teen-A-Go-Go strip with Powell, often using a small image of the titular hero on the cover. Around the same time, or slightly thereafter, she managed to sell a newspaper strip version of the same strip, which ran daily and Sunday for most of 1966. I had seen some of those dailies (and showed them here) but recently I came across a couple of Sundays, which were even more impressive than I thought from the black and white copies I saw. I will try and find some more dailies to ad to this, but for now, just feast your eyes.

I also found an online source for this strip, so I have added the first few Sundays in black and white. If you come back in a couple of months I will probably have added the rest of it's five month run. I do. ot yet have the accompanying dailies, but it seems to me that the dailies and Sundays had seperate storylines. As noted in the comments, the second story here is exceptionel in the fact that it shows a catfight between women over a flimsy dress and ends up with one of them in her bra. However that got past the cencors we'll never know. Maybe Bessy Little's track recond and seniority helped.

Slick Sick Pick

Wednesday Illustration Day.

I am a huge fan of the later satirical work of Bob Powell. I was able to include a couple of prime examples in my book Behaving Madly (clck on the right of this to get yours). He did some of his best work for Sick, which deserves a book all of it's own. One of the things he was best at, was doing magazine parodies, the same way Bob Clarke and George Woodbridge did for Mad. Here is a good one he did for Sick in 1965.