Showing posts with label Paul Tumey. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Paul Tumey. Show all posts

Sunday, March 26, 2017

Say It Ain't Cole

Friday Comic Book Day.

In the mid to late forties Plastic Man creator reinvested his commitment to his publisher Quality comics. Before that he had given more and more parts of the creation of his strips to other hand, possibly in an effort to produce as many stories as possible. But at a certain point, you can see him returning to Plastic Man, introducing new characters and helping out others to do the same.

Here are two stories I sent to Jack Cole expert Paul Tumey with the question if I was right to see Cole hand in these two stories. Paul replied that he saw why I would say that, but he feels it might just as well have been the work of Cole previous collaborators and style imitators, like Alex Kotzky. Main thing I see it that neither of these stories is by their regular creator. Her Highness, about an old lady running a group of gangsters, was usually done by Gill Fox. here the style is to wild and to lively to be by Fox. The characters expressions, the look of the ladies and the use of oddly shaped panels all remind me of Cole. The second story, Bob and Swab (named for a navy slang expression for a certain sexual combo delivered by some of the ladies they met on their travels) usually is by Klaus Nordling, although Cole is known to do a couple as well. Here we are left inbetween. The figures have Nordling's touches, but the layout and the action is more Cole style.

Either way they are fun stories.

Friday, May 23, 2014

Something Screwy Going On

Tuesday Comic Strip Day.

I love looking at stuff other people like. Sometimes it makes me like it as well. Especially if they write about it in an interesting way. Paul Tumey is such a writer, maybe the best out there. His blog about the work of Jack Cole is exemplary, full of well thought essays. When he exhausted his subject he took his thoughts to another genre, starting a blog about what he dubbed screwball comics. Or maybe he didn't invent the name, as there was a collection of silly, absurd and slapstick comics from the pre-war period from Rick Marshall at Nemo years ago. Anyway, in it he highlights the work of silly artists such as George Swanson, Bill Holman, Rube Goldberg, George Gross and others like them. He also has a Facebook group called The Masters of Screwball, which is a good starting point.

One of the strips he introduced me to, was The Nut Brothers by Gene Ahern. This silly and absurd strip full of illustrated puns was the topper to Our Boaring House one of the dullest entries in what was already a very dull genre, the blowhard strip, featuring a usually pompous, fat man at odds with the world around him. Anyway, The NUt Brothers is great fun and here is a set of samples from an ebay seller who was so kind to make such good scans that I didn't have to buy his wares. The colorin seems a bit boring, but I am not sure it is the official one. I have come across more samples of papers having their own coloring (usually simpler and cheaper). More often than not that was, as it is here, in a paper that published their Sundays on Saturday.