The Heart of Stan Drake

Saturday Leftover Day.

For today I prepared a special one-off. In the past I have showed here a lot of Sundays from Stan Drake's Juliet Jones as well as many of the side projects he did (mainly before) his seminal soap opera strip. Drake started out at Johnstone and Cushing (well, he did some work before that, including some illustration work in the war which I have somewhere but can't find anymore), developing his own version of the photo realistic 'advertising style'.

After that, it was always assumed that he went on directly to Juliet Jones, when King Features head Syvan Beck and writer Margeret Mitchell (trying to develop a soap opera strip) discovered him at the same time in advertising. But as I showed here in an earlier post, he was also doing illustrations for a serialized soap opera series in King Features' Pictorial Review supplement - a much more likely lead-in to Juliet Jones. Well, it turns out he also did illustration work for other magazines, most notably Bluebook. Bluebook was a monthly adventure story magazine, which appeared alongside the much more popular and better known Redbook. Copies of this early fifties magazine are not easy (or cheaply) to come by, but I have two in my collection.

So today I went and cleaned up scans from the stories Drake illustrated in the January and December issues.

Illustrator's Illustrator

Friday Comic Book Day.

You don't see a lot of Alex Kotzky in the comics, but when you do it's obvious.

At first the spot illustration may look to be by Stan Drake, but the older woman is more similar to Kotzky's later work on Appartment 3G and he did ghost for Drake's Juliet Jones now and again.

Here's To You, Misses Jones

Saturday Leftover Day.

I missed out on the story strips last thursday, so I am doing a little extra today.

arlier this year I shared a lot of Juliet Jones Sundays, including some later ones I scanned myself. The black and white ones were midding some epsodes, so I have gone back and filled in the gaps, so that you can now read the whole run from late August 1954 to April 1955. A great soap opera strip that was as well written as it was drawn.

Thrown Clear

Thursday Storystrip Day.

I have not yet been able to download and clip the last leg of the Juliet Jones story I started two weeks ago. In the meantime I have found some sources saying that Bob Lubers only took over from Stan Drake (after he had the accident which killed Alex Raymond). Still a huge feat, since he was doing his own daily and Sunday Long Sam as well. In that same period, it seems to me Bob Lubbers did some Juliet Jones Sundays as well. At that time, the Sundays and dailies of that strip had seperate storylines. The deadline for the Sundays was even more ahead of publication. I think the first story here is by Drake and the start of the second one is by Lubbers. Drake may have been back as soon as the third installment.

I will add the end of that story later...