Starting From Scratch

Sunday Surprise Day.

I think I can trace back my love of Lou Fine's work to the first time I saw his sixties detective strip Peter Scratch in the Minnomannee Falls Gazette. I came across a couple of issues of that great oversized magazine reprinting the best of newspaper comics from the then present (the seventies) and the past. Every strip in there was reprinted six dailies (one week) to a page, gving me a chance te discover strips such as Scratch, Ben Casey by Neal Admas and The Seekers by JohnBurns. I went back and bought whatever I could find, although I never got all of them. So in the end I never got to fully enjoy the almost wto year tun of Peter Scratch, although I id get my hands on a set of Sundays (which I shared on this blog - follow the link to see them).

So when I came across a full run of Peter Scratch on my michofiche site, I was temped to pull hem all and share them here. But the work involved makes it something that will not happen overnight. So here are the first adn the last week. The last week is sadly reproduced quite badly. But maybe it is an incentive for someome to do a complete one book reprinting.

 

Itching To Scratch

Saturday Leftover Day.

Recently, in a stack of Sunday comics to scan, I came across an oddity that surprised me. Two Sundays of Lou Fine's late fifties/early sixties soap opera strip Adam Ames. As you know, I am a huge fan of Fine's 'slick' style and have show much of his advertising work of the fifties, as well as runs of his later strips, including indeed Adam Ames. What I also mentioned there is that Adam Ames was a daily strip only. These two Sundays seemed to contradict that. So I went to the only source that knows it all, Alan Holtz' History Of American Newspaper Strips. And that confirmed my own findng, that Ames was indeed never a Sunday. So what happened. I found the 'answer' on Alan's blog, The Stripper's Guide. He had done a similar discoery (with even more pages, from which he sadly only showed one) and concluded that it must have been a reworking of the daily strip. In fact, for his sample, he also found the original dailies.

So here is the whole lot: my two 'Sundays', Alan's sample and the daily week that went along with that.

Let's end with showing an announcment for Lou Fine's other stripo from the sixties, Peter Scratch. Those who like that should follow the link to my short run of Scratcj Sundays.

Old School Detective

Thursday Story Strip Day.

More then twenty years ago I tried to get hold of as many issuues of The Menomonnee Falls Gazette as possible. Postage from the US was still cheap and everyone was trying to get rid of them because they take up so much room in you collection. The Gazette was a weekly paper reprinteng the best if the seventies adventure strips (which very often were strips that were running on their alst legs by then) and reprinting memorable strips from the years before as well as a couple of lesser known classics from British papers. These days, they are worth quite a lot of money, selling fro $10 to $15 each and the postage has gone up (as well as losing the option of having large lots delivered more cheaply). which means I have a very spotty selection of it 250+ issues. One of the strips that would make me go bakc and buy all of them is the rerpinting of Lou Fines sixties classic Peter Scratch. A solid detective strip in a soldi style, Scratch ran from the mearly to the late sixties and was drawn by Fine in his by then possibly already oldfashioned 'illustrator's style'. He had dveleoped this style in the mid forties as a reaction to Alex Raymond going from Flash Gordon to Rip Kirby and he was a master at it. Okay, financial and printing realities forced him to cut some corners towards the later part of his run and for some reason the Sundays were never the high point, but what I could see of it, it is a strip I wouldn't mind being collected in some sort of clever format. I have shown everal earlier, including a nice run of Sundays.

Seven Year Itch

Thursday Story Strip Day.

Here's a post I have been working on for a long time. Regular followers of my blog know I am a big fan of the laer work of Lou Fine. I know there are some (probably most) who prefer his earliers showy work. It was Will Eisner himself who said that Fine's handling of the brush was one of a kind. But I learned of his work from the Menommannee Faals Gazette, the week paper from the seventies and eighties that reprinted newspaper strips both from it's time and rare and colectable strips from Britain and the American past. It is there I first saw Neal Adams' Ben Casey, Modesty Baise, The New Seekers, Juliet Jones, Mary Perkins and other great story strips. And Lou Fine's hardbild detective strip Peter Scratch from the mid sixties. I really liked that strip and I really liked the style of it. The stories didn't grab me as much, but that didn;'t really matter. When I later came across Fine's advertising work in the fifties and his previous newspaper strip Adam Ames (whose storline I did like) I was even more impressed, so Peter Scratch sort of fell to the background.

Recently, I came aross a set of Peter Scratch Sundays that rekindled my interest in this last work of Fine. I still think it is not as great as his work in the forties, fifties and early sixties. As the decade progressed, more and more of the soap opera strips codefied their styles and fell into a sort of rut. But it is nice to some of these together and it is nice to finally see some Sundays.

I have added some of the black and white samples I have, including an announcement and the first daily, but the real gold is further on, with the color scans. I have also added a couple of new color Sundays from Butch Guice's Facebook page.