Hey, it's Arnold!

Tuesd Comic Strip Day.

Last week, I showed a couple of March Sundays from a satirical little strip I had never seen before, called Arnold. It turns out to have been a Sunday only strip, that started life as a college newspaper strip and which ran for only a couple of months. All I know about the strip and the artist comes from the announcing article from January 4th. I went back to my sourse and am proud to show you every Sunday of the short run of this strip. This is not all, of course. Over at The Stripper's Guide blog some commenter said he had seen the strip as a daily in the Ithaca college Newspaper. There is a color version of the top tier of the June 25 Sunday at the Dutch Lambiek website, which must come from another paper. And all the Sundays shown here except for one are two tier versions of what obviously was a three tier strip. All that remiand is to hope that either the artist or one of his reletives is still alive and tell us a little bit more about what might possibly be the first college newspaper strip to get national syndication.

Bumper Crop

Tuesday Comic Strip Day.

Like the New York Herald Tribune in the late forties and early fifties, the New York Daily News in the fifties and sixties was known for it's roster of unique strips, that were either done for their Sunday paper only, or distributed very badly. One of my favorites was Bumper to Bumper by Gill Fox, which I ran here earlier. Another well now fixture for a short while was Henri Arnold's This Man's Army, a sort of Beetle Baily only dealing mostly with officers rather than the soldiers themselves. Cartoonist Arnold also had kid's strip called Bibs 'n Tucker, which can't have run very long. I have only seen it once I think. Cindy Wood by Mel Casson I have never seen before and seems like a trail run for the much funnier It's Me, Dilly which he wrote for Alfred Andriola's assistant (or Andriola himself, although I doubt that).

After those two, I have another Thi Man's Army I ran across and a short run of a strip called Arnold from the late fifties and early sixties. This is the sort of strip I wanted to focus on when I started this blog. Drawn in the modern style by an unknown artist, it is one of those sarcastic strips that were all the rage in that period.

Would You Believe... Bob Hope?

Friday Comic Book Day.

Yesterday I showed you a bit of Neal Adams' Ben Casey. I have sinde collected the last story of that strip and will share that soon as well. When he finished Ben Casey in 1966, he went to DC. The first work he did there was on Bob Hope Adventures. He drew the last four titles, on scripts by Arnold DRake, who later wrote Deadman with/for him. The Bob Hope stories were drawn in the house style established by Owen Fitzgerald, Mort Drucker and Bob Oksner.