Where There Are Balls There's Fire

Wednesday Advertising Strip Day.

Here is the remainder of my Fireball Twigg ads done by an unknown artist in the Chich Young style. My collection is not complete, but I keep running into samples of ths strip, both in color and in black and white. Now at least I have a run of posts where I can add them whenever I want.

Aug 15 1948:


Aug 22 1948:


Aug 29 1948:


Sept 5 1948:


Sept 12 1948:


Sept 19 1948:


Sept 26 1948:


Oct 3 1948:

Great Twiggs Of Fire

Wednesday Advertisement Day.

Three more months worth of Fireball Twigg. This time my collection is less complete.

May 2 1948:


May 18 1948:


May ?? 1948:


May 30 1948:


June 6 1948:


June 20 1948:


June 27 1948:


July 4 1948;


July 11 1948:


July 18 1948:


July 25 1948:

The Adstrip of Champions

Wednesday Advertising Day

Regular visitors will know that I am quite fond of Fireball Twigg a Bloindie-like series of comic strip ads for Kellogg's that ran weekly for a short period in 1948. I still don't know if it is the work of Vhich Young himself one of his assistants or someone imitating his style. But here are thre more. Most I have shown are from May. Two of these are earlier, one later than those. Use the tag to see the others.

March 28:


April 4:


June 20:

Outfoxed.

Tuesday Early Leftovers.

End of the day and I haven't gotten around to scanning my last few Leon Winick Jeanie Sundyas. So I guess I'll have to look around for some bits and pieces and do the Jeanies this weekend.

Here's an original 5 have been waiting to show for some time. This is one of the other Sunday strips that were made especially for the New York Star. The same paper that had Gill Fox's Bumper To Bumper as an occasional filler. This strip by the not too exiting cartoonist Henri Arnold is a sort of Beetle Bailey imitation, but the humor is very different and the style is similar but not close. This strip ran for a very long time, but probably not as long as `bumper to Bumper. I have many more, which I can show if there is anyone interested. For me, it is more of a time-piece, illustrating how every cartoonist tried to get a strip going in the fifties.



Next up is a gag page by Gill Fox. The style seems to be clearly fifties, about the time he did all that work for Johnstone and Cushing. But it doesn't seem to be an advertising job. So what was it? A special strip for a pharmacist magazine?



Tomorrow I'll have more by Howie Post. Here is a Lyndon Johnson caricature I found on the internet.


Finally, for all the Blondie fans out there, here is a Blondie gag from Jan 20 1952. Compare it to the Fireball Twigg ad I showed yesterday, if you like. As long as you are looking at yesterday's post, I also added one more comic book ad, I forgot to post yesterday. One that seems to be by Greig Flessel.

The Best A Man Can Get

Wednesday advertising strip day.

One Dutch comic artist I met told me he loved the blog, except for the realistic stuff. So here is more realistic stuff.



I love those Postum ads. They were started by Milt Caniff and Noel Sickles and although they are still in the same style, the art has been taken over by someone else. My guess would be either Alex Kotsky or Leonard Starr. Starr is still alive (and doing covers for the wonderful reprint series of his stille very readable soap opera strip On Stage). If only he would visit here. If only I could talk to him about his years at Johnstone and Cushing.

Most comic strip ad campaigns were created for the Sunday pages only. Some of them were reformatted to be used in comic books in the forties. Especially DC used a lot of these comic ads in their books. Some were seem to have been reformatted from Sundays, other were especially drawn. The Pepsi Cops was a very popular series (started by Rube Goldberg and continued by several very capable artists) that ran both in comics and the Sunday pages. I have also seen short strips using the Neddy Nestle character by the regular artist of that character, Jack Betts, but no whole strips that look like the ones that were done in the late forties and early fifties Sunday ads. But the one ad strip series I recognized immediately was a Sam Spade strip done for Wildroot as a tie-in to the CBS radio show in 1948 and 1949. Some collectors have made lists of ad strips by famous artists such as Lee Elias, but no list has been made of the Sam Spade stories. They were probably done by Lou Fine or Alex Kotzky and deserve some attention as well. All comic books samples were taken from DC's funny animal book Funny Stuff #34 except for the Sam Spade one pager, which came from Boy Commandos #27.

One ad eries that has been documented well is C.C. Beck's Captain Tootsie. Though Beck wasn't the only one working on this series (which ran well into the fifties), his connection to this strip as the most important artist of Captain Marvel, has lead to som eserious attention from the Captain Marvel fans. Captain Tootsie didn't just run as one page ads in the DC books, but also in other companies books. He also had several comc books of his own, most of which had hardly any advertising. When I ran across a series of daily ads for Captain Tooptsie from the midfifties, I contacted P.C. Hamerlinck about them, think he could probably use them. He told me he was preparing a list of all Captain Tootsie appearnces for a future installment of the FCA pages in Alter Ego. I am still looking forward to them. In the meantime, here is a sample from the strip in it's prime period.


This one was new to me. Looks like Lou Fine following Alex Raymond's lead into a slicker illustration style.


Another one I had never seen before. This time artist looks familiar. The characters remind me of the later wor of Greig Flessel.


Sam Spade in the comics. From Boy Commandos #27, 1948.


And here he is in the Sunday papers a year later. March 20, 1949. Apparently my paper has a crease on the left hand side. I should go back and rescan this.


This Bazooka ad seems to have been done by Irwin Hasen. I have a couple more, which I will show later.


Finally two cartoon ads from another series I like. The Blondie-inspired Fireball Twigg. I read somewhere that Paul Fung, who took over the strip from Chic Young in thee early sixties was assisting him as early as the late forties. Which may mean he was involved in this strip as well.

May 30, 1948:


August 22, 1948:

Grapenut Flakes Post

Wednesday Advertising Day.

Last week I showed you some early fifties Blondie Sundays that were a lot more lively than the later years of that strip might have made you expect. This weekend, I showed a couple of pages of Harvey Kurtzman imitating that style. Here are two 1948 instalments of a 1948 ad that goes with it.

Fireball Twigg was a series of ads done in 1948 for Post's Grapenut Flakes, a well know cereal at the time. I believe they also sponsored some big radio show. The ads featured a couple very much like Blondie and Dagwood and were either done by Chick Young, making a bit of extra cash on the side or by someone imitating his style. When I showed a example from the same series, I figured it was the latter. I would even say it might be by Gill Fox, as I see some of his touches. Certainly the dog in the last panel isn't very much in Blondie's style and the vagrant in the first strip owes more to Jimmy Hatlo than to Chick Young. These are from May 1948 and both have a line saying 'to be continued', indicating this was a series. The one I showed a couple of weeks ago, was from Augustus, so the story might even have run for a couple of months.

May 5 1948:

Swinging with the oldies.

Tuesday newspaper strip day.

One of the biggest surprises when I started looking at the newspaper strips from the forties, was Chic Young's Blondie. First of all, I had gotten the impression that the forties was a barren wasteland for newspaper strips, full of dying strips and half dead zombies being kept alive by the assistants of the assistants. Some strips we associate with the thirties took as long as till the end of the fifties to finally make place for the new crop. Meanwhile the real innovation was being made in the magazine cartoons and in animation. These fields were the breeding ground for the new generation of strip artists, most of which got their opportunity in the fifties or early sixties. This is still true, but reality is more complicated (as always). Some of the assistants turn out to be quite good artists themselves. This was more true in the realistic strips, but in the cartoon strips as well, some fine work was done. I think, for instance, that the artist taking over Popeye from Segar, is a lot better than people take him for. Maybe I'll show you some samples at a later point.

But the major revelation was Blondie. I know Blondie from two periods. The early period has been reprinted a lot, and although it is interesting from a historical point of view, it is to much rooted in the cartoon traditions of the thirties to be really interesting. And of course, I know the strip from it's later years, starting with the side burn years of the late sixties and seventies to the rejuvenation by cartoonist extraordinaire Stan Drake and the subsequent dullification by the sixth generation of creators.

But those Sunday pages from the forties are really something else. The strip is for of life, slapstick and some really great observational humor. Now, as I understand it, Chick Young was still doing the strip by himself, although he did employ the assistant who later in the sixties would take over the strip completely. If you take a closer look at the art, you'll see that it is still rooted in the circle and sticks basic style of the thirties, but in the years since that, Young (or his assistants) had developed an ink line that was razor sharp. Everything I like about the cartoonists of the fifties, is already there. Take a look at the mouth of the titular heroin Blondie, for instance... this is the same mouth that Dan deCarlo uses on all his characters. In fact, that mouth and the black dotted eyes are the two trademarks that hold together all the great modern cartoonists of the fifties and early sixties. Even Bud Blake owed some debt to Young...!

One of the major reasons, I never noticed before how lively Blondie had been , is te way the strip was formatted. Underneath I will show you one sample from 1952, that is formatted in the way I got to know Blondie. Twelve panels on half page, which seems like the intended format for the strip. But when you look at the two other samples (one from 1950 and one from 1952) from the Puck section, you'll see how the strip was really intended to be shown. In this format of twelve square panels on two thirds of a page, the panels are all packed with action. The nationally syndicated Puck section was the only one presenting the strip in this form, as far as I know. If the topper strip (a silent strip about a Duchess) was added, a whole Chick Young page was created, but even Puck didn't do that. Instead they added a two tier version of Beetle Bailey or another popular comedy strip to the first page. All the other papers printed Blondie with elongated panels to fit it in a half page, which take out all the life and energy and make it seem a lot more bland than it is. Later, a tabloid version was also offered, which used the elongated panels as well. It was in this form that I got to know and hate Blondie for the first time, when it was published on the back page of a Dutch television guide.

All in all, I'd say that Blondie is the victim of publishers habit of starting with the earliest strips. The only reason I am buying the complete Terry and the Pirates is because it is being done in a great format and complete in six books. But I only need the fifth and sixth book, because all the other strips have been reprinted here and there so many times, that I have read every story at least twice. Same with the intended reprinting of Pogo by Fantagraphics. We now have the first years of this strip in three different forms. Of course, they will be the first to include the Sundays, so I will certainly be buying these books if and when they finally appear, but why not map out the books in advance and start with tome #16 to give us the never reprinted Pogo in Hysteria sequence from 1966? No one is ever going to do a complete Blondie... and if they do, they will have to start at the beginning, which will scare of potential buyers and the series will not progress beyond the early forties. But if Fantagraphics or anyone would do a complete edition of 1948 in the same format they are using for Popeye... they might have a whole new audience.

Restructuring

Tuesday Comic Strip Day.

After having tried out this blog thing for the last couple of weeks, I have decided I like it. I know which times are good to upload and which are a crime. I have installed a counter so I know how many hits I have. So now it's time to get some sort of structural order into this mess.

I see some bloggers use a theme approach to some of the days. Michael T. Gilbert has Lady Luck Fridays, Arf Forum has Wonder Woman Wednesdays, etc... since I have so much great stuff to choose from, I have decided to devote every day to specific theme.

Monday will be cartoon day. I will explore the rich world of magazine cartoons from the fifties (and sometimes forties and sixties). That will mean more cartoons from people such as Mort Walker, Johnny Hart and Brent Parker. But I have also been gearing up for a couple of surprises.This will include a look at Jack Cole's cartoon career with many unknown early samples.

Tuesday will be humor strip day. Continuing my look at rare and unjustifiably not reprinted comic strip art from the fifties and early sixties. I have a few more P.T. Bimbo Sunday (although my stash is running low), early B.C., maybe some early Wizard of Id, Brent Parker's forgotten bureaucracy strip from the seventies, a Jack Cole Betsy and Me Sunday that was not reprinted in the 'complete' edition by Fantagraphics, early Beetle Bailey, more of Willie Lumpkin (thanks to Angelo) and Stan Lee's other comic strip adventures.

Wednesday will be advertising day. My interest in the company of Johnstone and Cushing has lead me to scan and collect a lot of advertising comic art, as well as 'educational' and 'promotional' comic books, which will be fun to share.

Thursday will be adventure strip day. Up till now, I have been concentrating on cartoon strips, but my interest in the 'realistic' artists of the fifties is just as big. I will start by finishing my run of Jeanie originals, including the complete strips for August and September 1952. After that, who know where we'll go. As always, I will be concentrating on stuff that's not been reprinted.

Fridays will be comic book story day. I will start with comic book stories by the artists I have been covering up till now, but waiting in the wings are Klaus Nordling's The Barker, the funny one-pagers done for the Quality books by Jack Cole, lots of great stories from the fifties by Gene Colan and a look at the depressing war books from Atlas Comics (the later Marvel).

Saturdays and Sundays will be for mopping up and maybe trying out some new stuff. For instance, there are several Dutch newspaper strips I would like to translate and share with you. I also want to delve into such subjects as the silent strip, comic strips reportage's and magazine illustrations by comic book artists.

As you have noticed, I tend to branch out from a few interests into others. My love of Dik Browne has lead me to Gill Fox. Gill Fox has lead me to Klaus Nordling. From Klaus Nordling to Jack Cole is just a short jump. Brown and Fox both worked for Boy's Life, which also has great material by Craig Fleissel, Lou Fine, George Evans and Tom Schreurer/Sawyer (boy scout strips, biographies and other infotainment) and John Collin Murphy, Irv Novick and Bernie Krigstein (illustrations). As well as cartoons by Busino, which may mean nothing to most readers, but has a great nostalgic connection for me.

Anyone who wants me to try and find something else from that period should not hesitate to ask.

Because I wouldn't want to leave you without a nice illustration, I am uploading a advert from 1948 by an unknown artist. It could be Chick Young, the artist who drew Blondie (which at that point was it it's absolute best, as I will show one of these days). But it could also be an artist (such as Gill Fox, but there are more who would be capable of doing something like this) imitating his style. Some of the slicker aspects of this ad make me suspect the following.

It's this ad, by the way, which made me realise how much Dan deCarlo's style owes to Young... just look at the cartoony side view of the female in this strip. DeCarlo made a living from that profile alone (although he did add some attributes of his own).

Aug 19 1948: