Alfred Mazure's Romeo Brown

Wherefore Art Thou Romeo?
 
Romeo Brown first appeared in 1954 in London's Daily Mirror, home of the grandmother of "girlie" strips, Norman Pett's Jane. Romeo Brown was a clueless private detective who fancied himself irresistible. His mysteries always found him surrounded by beautiful girls wearing clothes that never stayed on. The drawings were by Alfred Mazure, a Dutch-born illustrator with a long and interesting career both at home and in England. (I'll talk about his background in my next post.) Mazure drew the strip through 1957.

Romeo Brown is poorly-documented and its history is obscure. Many online sources credit writer Peter O'Donnell as co-creator with Mazure. This is clearly an error: O'Donnell began writing Romeo in 1956. No one seems to know from whom he took over. In an interview O'Donnell merely said he was offered the job because "the editor was dissatisfied." Given that Mazure had written his own scripts in the past, might he have been the original Romeo writer? Maybe, but several sources state that Mazure, after working with O'Donnell for a year, left Romeo to launch "his own creation," Carmen & Co., at a rival newspaper. If he'd been the original Romeo Brown author, wouldn't Romeo count as his "own creation"? At any rate, following Mazure's departure O'Donnell continued writing and Jim Holdaway took over the art chores. We all know where those two wound up. (One source said Holdaway had been Mazure's assistant, but I haven't found confirmation of this.)

In a 2002 online interview, O'Donnell described the strip thus: "Romeo Brown was a comic private detective, and my brief was that every story was to revolve around a girl or girls, and the more clothes I could safely get off them the better."

The Holdaway-O'Donnell Romeo Brown has gained a small international following, though reprints are few. It's too bad that Mazure's Romeo has suffered as a result. While Mazure's free, brushy style and Holdaway's sharp-focused penwork were worlds apart, both men were excellent cartoonists and both did a fine job on Romeo Brown.

Perhaps the greatest difference between the two artists' approaches was in posing. Holdaway developed a broad slapstick approach, while Mazure's work was always tempered by fashion-art elegance.  As we see in the present story, languid, long-legged realistic women co-exist with broadly-cartooned men. Romeo himself has a cucumber head and shoebutton eyes, while his adversaries' husbands--one a wizened alcoholic, the other a bloated bureaucrat--are so incongruous that the reader wonders what the girls see in them. However there's no question what their husbands see in them.

As a fan of both men's work, I'm reluctant to label one the "better" artist. All the same, I'd like to suggest that though Holdaway brought a more consistent, more exciting look to the strip, he never managed to best his predecessor in one area: drawing pretty women. Don't misunderstand me. Holdaway's beauties had great bodies. Their faces were cute. But Mazure could draw a face that was knock-down gorgeous. He proves it in this episode, especially with Pussy, the more free-wheeling of the larcenous ladies. Mazure knew he had a good thing going, and provided us a wealth of ravishing closeups. These faces showcase the best features of Maz' bold, free brushwork.

The following story begins with strip N208. British strips I've seen with letter/number identifiers use the letter to identify which story it is (A for the first story, B for the second, etc.) and the number to indicate where the strip falls within the story (so A1 is first story, first daily and E65 is fifth story, 65th daily). That doesn't seem to be the system here  "N" may mean the 14th story, but "208" must mean something else. Probably not the cumulative number of strips--that would yield an average of only 15 strips per story!

I have never found Mazure's work in English. This story came from an Italian fanzine called Wow. I translated their script back into English. But it's possible that the Italians shot their strips from a French reprint. In that case my approximate script is three generations removed from the original dialogue. But we're here for the pictures anyway, right?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now that we've all admired these beautiful drawings, will someone please explain the talking neck shot in strip N218???!

Frank Langford, Jack and Jill

 He She, Ho Hum
Today we see examples of a long-running but poorly-documented British daily strip, "Jack and Jill."  According to Lambiek it ran in the Herald and Sun tabloids, but I've been unable to determine just when. These strips were printed in translation in an Italian comic collection called Eureka Drink, dated 1975. Eureka was one of many 1970s Italian magazines reprinting both old and new comic strips from around the world. While Italian fan publishers were positively anal about providing publication dates for strips they reprinted, periodicals like Eureka almost never did. In fact they seldom gave much information about the features beyond the creators' names.

"Jack and Jill" was a daily gag strip featuring a young married couple. Jack works in an office; Jill stays at home. In the strip's first week they discover "the Pill didn't work" and Jill is pregnant. The jokes are divided between his office and her pregnancy. Around strip #230 Jill has twins. That's all I know because that's where the Italian reprint ends.

"Jack and Jill" was written by Les Lilley, a giant of British comics. The Independent's 1998 obituary called Lilley "...a scriptwriter of literally thousands of strip cartoons and gags...[and] a man who spent many years of his life endeavoring to promote that Cinderella of the comic arts in the public consciousness." Alone and with others Lilley wrote not just for comics but also for TV. He started the Cartoonists' Club of Great Britain and became President of the Federation of European Cartoonists' Organizations. Among his countless projects, American fans may recognize "The Seekers," "Tiffany Jones," and "Scarth."

(source: anthonyscomicbookart.com)

"Jack and Jill's" lovely drawings were by Frank Langford, a prolific English comics artist who didn't leave much of a biographical footprint. His best-known UK comics were TV-related strips like "Lady Penelope"  and "The Persuaders" and an s-f strip called "The Angry Planet." In the 1970s he drew several romance stories for DC Comics, probably the only time US fans ever saw his work. Langford drew a slew of advertising strips in the UK and apparently did movie posters as well. Langford appears to have died in 1998, the year of Les Lilley's passing.

In 2008 the Bear Alley blog hosted a long thread about Langford with input from the artist's niece, who provided much interesting information--including the fact that Langford was born Cyril Eidlestein but later changed his name.

Though Les Lilley was a fine writer, "Jack and Jill" was minor stuff with very lightweight gags. Frank Langford's artwork is definitely the strip's main draw.  Langford quickly developed a clean, figure-centered style. He seldom went in for elaborate backgrounds or dramatic effects, but that didn't hurt the strip. His men were handsome, his women beautiful, and his line elegant and assured.

Eureka Drink ran some 60 pages of "Jack and Jill." What follows are six typical pages. They've been re-translated from the Italian, of course, so heaven knows what the original dialogue was. At least you can get an idea what the story was about.

British Cartoonists Album: Part 2

A Glance at English Strippers
Today we continue yesterday's stroll through the 1962 British Cartoonists Album. This will be the first of two posts focusing on the collection's sampling of newspaper strips. Strips in the Album come in two flavors: individual dailies placed among the cartoons, and proof sheets filling an entire page. We'll start with the former category and tackle the latter next time.

An inauspicious start: beneath a Clive Hudson he-she cartoon  are two unnamed strips by a cartoonist named Ghilchik. The lightweight jokes seem to depict the escapades of Boy Scouts. I found many online references to a cartoonist named David Louis Ghilchik, who was active at Punch during the 1930s. Could this possibly be the same guy? The style in his Punch work looks nothing like these strips.

 

Next comes a caricature of someone I don't recognize and an amusing gag by a Daily Sketch cartoonist named Rains. Below that is an interesting sample from a pin-up strip called Lindy, drawn by Ernest Ratcliff. I don't know how long this strip ran; Ratcliff apparently drew several British girl strips. He was also a magazine illustrator during the 1950s. This sample only hints at Ratcliff's abilities. Take a look at these two originals on comicartfans. Nice!

 

 I'm puzzled that while Lindy has a nice pin-up figure, her face isn't particularly pretty. I gather from this sample she's supposed to be a "tough broad" type; maybe this was extended to her character design.

An entire page is given to Trog's Flook. I can add nothing to the reams of material written about this British icon, except to wonder that anyone could have thought of syndicating this ultra-English strip in the USA (It happened!).

Beneath a funny gag by Spencer is a superb Carol Day daily by David Wright. I've never seen enough strips from any Carol Day continuity to get a sense of the stories. Various commentators have called them "brooding" and even "death-obsessed." However there's no question about the quality of Wright's art. For years he used the elaborate cross-hatched style shown here. Later he switched to rendering with overlaid Ben Day films. The art still looked great, but I prefer the earlier pen style, which ranked right up there with the great Gilded Age penmen. Carol has her own website, carol-day.com, with biographical info and tons of beautiful art supplied by Wright's son Patrick.

After Carol comes a typical episode of the seafaring adventure strip Tug Transom, which the Album misspells "Transon." Alfred Sindall's rough-edged, brush-based artwork was just right for the subject. Scripts were supplied by Peter O'Donnell. I was interested to learn that Sindall was the original artist on Paul Temple, though I haven't turned up any examples.

 Next are two gags by Burgin. Wrapping up the page is For Better or for Worse, a gag-a-day strip about a young married couple. Leslie Caswell's art seems a touch over-realistic for such a strip, but the closer you look the more there is to like. The chattering biddies in the last panel are wonderfully characterized. It turns out Caswell was more of an illustrator than a comics artist. He did many monochrome illos for various British magazines. Here's a nice overview of his work. For Better or for Worse seems to have run quite a while. It was later taken over by Frank Langford, another talented illustrator, who brought a more decorative style to the project. One web reference from 2008 said a "modernized" version of the strip was still running.

The frustrations of search engines hover over Twick by Digby Adams for the Thomson Newspapers. Overwhelmed by Twickenham, Digby the World's Biggest Dog, Douglas Adams, and companies named Thompson, I found nary a mention of this so-so married-couple strip.

Speakiing of married-couple strips, I get a distinct Dagwood vibe from The Daily Dees by Butterworth, though the art isn't that similar. Perhaps it's the Chic Young-style balloons, which are rare in British strips. I don't know anything about the artist. It surely couldn't be Jenny Butterworth, the Tiffany Jones artist. But it's she and Rick Dees who dominate the Google results.

The strip below the Dees is my nominee for the hidden jewel of the collection. I'd never heard of Colonel Pewter, but I was impressed by Arthur Horner's whimsical artwork. Thanks to the Web, I've learned that Horner was an Australian cartoonist who lived for many years in England. He wrote and drew the Colonel's adventures between 1952 and 1970. The more I read about this strip, which combined social commentary with fanciful adventures and odd characters, the more I want to read a long run. Here's an introduction on the "Ian T. Graphics" blog. Maybe I'll be able to scour up a (affordable) copy of one of the reprints.



Next post we'll scan a few proof sheets from noted English continuity strips.

British Cartoonists Album: Part 1

A British Cartoonifest
I haven't posted for a couple of months thanks mostly to  a crisis of confidence with which I'll deal in a future post. Maybe. In the meantime I'd much rather talk about another old book that's surfaced during my never-ending excavation of the Great Garage.

I picked up British Cartoonists Album (no "the," no punctuation) decades ago in one of the little used-book stores that once dotted Los Angeles. In those pre-Internet days the Album was like a tiny window providing a tantalizing glimpse of a wonderful world that I would never get to explore.

It's always seemed to me that English comics are among the world's most woefully-underdocumented. Thanks to the World Wide Web the situation is improving, especially given blogs like those of Lew Stringer and Dez Skinn, men who are not only historians but also writer/editors who have worked in the field for years. Their articles have been an endless source of enlightenment. Even so, the sheer volume of English comics--newspaper strips, comic papers, comic books, annuals, etc. etc.--would provide years of material for an army of researchers.

The Cartooonists Album was published in 1962 by Anthony Gibbs & Phillips, Ltd. It was "prepared under the auspices of the British Cartoonists Club." No editor is listed, just the list of the club's officers, beginning with His Grace the Duke of Bedford.  The 128-page hardback is a smorgasbord of gag cartoons, political cartoons, and newspaper strips.  In most cases the artists, especially the political and gag cartoonists, are people I'd never heard of. Probably English readers will know many of them. Over the next couple of postings I'll offer glimpses of this cartoon treasure trove.

As a prelude, here are the book's vital statistics, followed by a listing of the featured artists. To my annoyance many of them are identified only by their last names. Fine in 1962, when everyone knew them, but less than helpful when you're Googling a cartoonist named "Lee."

 

This page offers two quite different strips. The first is Barley Bottom by Lucian. Believe it or not the only Web reference I've found to Barley Bottom is a 1963 article in The Catholic Herald describing a "harmless wart cure" mentioned in the strip. Obviously those are caricatures of real MPs in panel one. Can any English readers identify them? Of all the work in the book, Double Trouble by Brian White is the most old-fashioned. This isn't surprising: White was born in 1902. In the late 1920s his company produced animated commercials for movie theaters. Decades later he worked on the milestone animated feature Animal Farm.
 
On the left of the spread below is a  nicely-drawn political cartoon by the above-mentioned Lee. It's one of several cartoons basing its gag on corporal punishment in English public schools. The right-hand page features two cartoons by Bill Tidy. Tidy was one of the few English gag cartoonists I knew when I bought the Album. Earlier I had stumbled upon a reprint of his Fosdyke Saga strip. I love Tidy's stuff; his gags are consistently funny. His art style reminds me of Larry (also represented in the Album), but paging through the book I notice a number of gag men with similar styles. Was there a "granddaddy" cartoonist who influenced them?

 
Here's a nice find: The opening days of Jane, Daughter of Jane, drawn by Dutch cartoonist Alfred Mazure. This was one of several English "girl" strips done by this talented (and nearly forgotten) artist-writer. One of them was Romeo Brown, which "Maz" originated. That strip was later taken over by Peter O'Donnell and Jim Holdaway--you may have heard of them. Daughter of Jane was an attempt to re-create the success of Jane, the iconic World War II pin-up strip. Unfortunately it didn't catch on. On the right page are two gags by Leslie Starke, a Punch cartoonist, and an episode of Will Spencer's Animal Crackers. This amusing panel ran for twenty years and was syndicated overseas, including in the US.
 
 Wrapping up today's episode is a montage of really great stuff. First comes a John McNamara Paul Temple daily. I used to follow this strip in the Menomonee Falls Gazette. McNamara's layouts were a bit stodgy--just like the scripts--but his draughtsmanship was excellent. Lew Stringer posted some later Temples in which the venerable hero was redesigned to appear more up-to-date. The strictly-upper-crust stories didn't change, though.

Following McNamara are two panels by Arthur Ferrier, a legendary pretty-girl cartoonist. Ferrier is credited with pioneering the English pinup-strip in the 1930s with a weekly feature, Film Fannie. He did other weeklies and in 1953 did a daily strip, Eve.

I don't know anything about Vic Wiltshire. He may still be around: ebay.uk  offers many copies of a 2002 book by Derek Robinson and Vic Wiltshire, A Load of Old Bristle. It's a humorous illustrated glossary of Bristol dialect.

Winding up the spread is a smashing panorama from Tony Weare's Matt Marriott, reproduced criminally small. In fact my one gripe with the Album is its indifferent reproduction. The rough-surface book paper doesn't help, and too many illustrations are much too small. Later in the book several continuity strips are represented by syndicate proof pages--an entire week of strips shrunk to fit a page the size of an American comic book. Ouch!

Next post I'll show some of those strips, ouch and all.

English Comic Strips

Oh, não! It's the Bionic Englishwoman!
A friend with a lifetime's collection of odd stuff enjoys feeding me things he can't imagine anyone wanting. Last week it was MULHER BIÔNICA, which is to say, The Bionic Woman in Portugese. This roughly 8"x10" 36 page full-color booklet was published in Brazil by Ebal (Editoria Brasil-America) and bears a 1979 copyright.

This interesting comic reprints two stories from Look-In, an English comic paper from the 1970s which specialized in TV show tie-in strips. A little Googling revealed that Look-In began running Bionic Woman in 1976. The Ebal booklet's artwork is by two well-known British illustrators with credits on both sides of the Atlantic. The first, "The Bionic Woman vs. the Black Dragons," was drawn by John Bolton:

Bolton's work, showing influences from Frank Bellamy, is very nice, with many interesting color effects. While there's a lot of movement in his panels, Bolton often pulls the camera back during action scenes, robbing them of immediacy.

The second story, "The Martians," is drawn by the prolific John M. Burns. His comic-book approach is more dynamic than Bolton's. Action scenes jump from the page. Burns does insert giant character heads into too many pages, though this being a TV tie-in I suppose that's forgivable.

My biggest gripe with Burns (other than his customary sloughing off of backgrounds) is that his bizarre color choices render some panels nearly unreadable. I've seen other work by Burns with equally chaotic color schemes, so I presume that color just isn't his bag.

In my opinion most English comic-paper stories suffer from shallow, diagrammatic scripts. The comic paper format is largely to blame. Most papers ran major full-color features on the front and back pages of each weekly issue. This limited story development within a given episode. Frequently a false climax was built into the bottom row of the first page to carry readers to the continuation on the back cover. Another climax concluded that page, to encourage the kids to buy the next issue.

These factors, combined with space taken up by big heads and "poster" scenes, encouraged rudimentary stories. The greater page-counts given features in comics magazines like 2000 AD were a big step forward.

Another thing that strikes me about comic-paper features is their slapdash panel arrangements. We haven't seen layouts like this in the USA since the Golden Age: overlaps, tilted panels, odd shapes with starburst and lighting-bolt borders. No doubt this was intended to make the paper as exciting as possible on the newsstand. Printed one after the other in a book like this, the loud layouts quickly tire the brain.