Fighting Words

Saturday Leftover Day. 

I am still looking at daily comic strip ads and seems there were even more of them than I had imagined. The series for Scott Energy Emulsion appeqred only in Boston papers, but seems to have been made by the Johnstone and Cushing Agency. The lettering and the art style are fitting. I am not sure who drew this series, but it wouldn't surprise me if Craig Fleissel was involved. All these daily ads... it half doubles the J&C output that was known so far. This weird series (suggesting some sort of continuity without deliverin git) ran four three months. The two papers I found it in, did not seem to run it at from the saem starting point.

 

Shine The Light!

Saturday Leftover Day. 

I have always been an admirer of Creig Flessel's work. Not only because of his slick realism with a hint of cartooning) or his funny cartoon art (with a hint of realism), or his reliable work for the Johnstone and Cushing company on the Eveready ads or the comic section in Boy's Life , or his funny Sundays and mature storytelling on the dailies of David Crane in the sixties, but mostly for the fact that he had been there all the time. The man worked on the first DC comics as an artist and editor, even. He was still alive when I was starting this blog and developing an interest in the forgotten history of comics and I can kick myself blue in the shins that I didn't contact him to talk about everything besides superheroes (where most interviews he did sadly concentrated on).

In the early forties he was one of the artists asked to contribute to the Story-of-the-Month daily syndicated series of illustrated bestsellers. The art is solid, a lot more so than most of the comic book art produced at that time. No wonder he ended up in the much more lucrative commercial art field.

 

The Oddness of Dodd

Sunday Sermon Day. 

 

A friend of mine on the internet was talking about the Win Mortimer's David Crane, whoch was written by Ed Dodd, who also wrote and drew the ecological Mark Trail. Apparently Dodd's father was a clergyman and although he did not follow in his father's footsteps, he did create this Christian message strip as a tribute to his dad. In Mark Trail, he used the Sundays to illustrate facts about nature. In David Crane, he often used the Sundays for sermons, making for a weird, but truely unique run. After Mortimer left, the strip was taken over by Craig Flessel, which is how and why I ran into it. I am a huge fan of Flessel's style and it is nowhere better than in his David Crane. I showed many of them early on in this blog, which you can find if you follow the link and the strips were funnier. The sermons were gone by then, so maybe Dodd had also left it. In all honesty, looking at the latest Mortimer Sundays, you can see that change was set in before Flessel took over. And the dailies were just as soapy as before, so that gives us no clue either. I also amassed quite a few of Mortimer's version, but did not really care for it. I scanned a few and when I started selling my newspaper sections on Ebay I scanned some more. The recent internet conversation was a good excuse to clean them up and show them here. If not for the exciting art (because it isn't) or the Christian message (not my thing) than certainly for the oddness or unique use of the medium.