The Illustrator's School

Sunday Additional Material day.

I have shared some selfmade scans of Stan Drake's illustration work for Bluebook in the early fifties, just before he started The Heart of Juliet Jones. Here are some more I picked from an online resource. Of course, some of the pages were double and should be seen that way. For the others, you can click the link.

Another frequent contributor to Blue Book was later Big Ben Bolt and Prince Valiant artist John Cullen Murphy. He started out as a sports illustrator, working mainly for Collier's but he turns up here as well.

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.

Send In The Comic Artists

Saturday Leftover Day.

Before John Cullen Murphy drew the fifties boxing strip Big Ben Bolt, he was mainly active as a sports illustrator for various magazines. One of his most important clients was Collier's, but I have also seen his work in Boy's Life and other places. This piece, taken from the relatively unknown man's digest 21, is a bit different. For the larger magazines he usually illustrated articles and short stories by others, often not only in line but also in full color. This piece reads as if it is put together by Murphy himself and looks like an early example of comics journalism - very similar to the articles Harvey Kurtzman had some of his artists *such as Paul Coker, Jack Davis and Robert crumb) do for the satirical Help! magazine in the early sixties. A magazine that Joe Sacco knew about when he did his groundbreaking books on Gaza and Bosnia.