Not everything Is Black and White

Sunday Surprise Day.

In the late forties Milt Caniff and Noel Sickles did a series of newspaper comic strips ads together under the pseudonymn Paul Arthur. They had two clients: Mr. Coffee Nerves and Fels-Naptha. I have shown most (if not all of those, if you follow the links). Hre are two ads that are never mentioned, but I think they (or either of them) are involved with it as well. I have seen a lot of ads from this period and there are a lot of similarities between all of them. But these have that modern look of Caniff and Sickles in more than one place. I am putting them up here, so I can refer to them elsewhere, There done before the Paul Arthur ones, so I don't think it is someone aping them.

Nervous Disposition

Saturday Leftover Day.

In the late thirties Milt Caniff and Noel Sickles collaborated on a couple of Sunday newspaper ads under the pseudonymn Paul Arthur. In fact, you can find most of them on this blog if you follow the link. Recently I came across two unsigned ads from the same time period that look oddly similar. All evidence point to them not being by Caniif and Sickles, but I am not 100% sure.

Getting My Nerves On

Wednesday Advertising Day.

I have shown more of these Postum Coffee ads before. They are interesting because of two things. In the late thirties they were done by Milt Caniff and Noel Sickles, who took turns using the pseudonym Paul Arthur. After the war they were don eby Lou Fine, who honed his 'slick style on them. In between there were some that were altohether different and seem to be the work of Pual Fung. I have shown those earlier as well. And there were some done in a different format, a black and white one tier strip, which would nogt have been out of place in a daily newspaper although I've always only seen them in Sunday Papers underneath a regular full page strip. The artist si unknown to me, but they are interesting because they introduce the Mr. Coffee Nerves character, which was later used to good advantage by Lou Fine and which seems to have been the visual inspiration of the develish charcater that told the crime stories in Gleason's celebrated Crime Does Not Pay series of comic books.

I have added two newsly found Lou Fine ads, which I may or may not have shown before - but they look new to me.

Nothing To Get Upset About

Wednesday Advertising Day.

I have paid attention to the Postum and Mr. Coffee Nerve ads pretty thoroughly in the early years of this blog. But it still run into a new one every now and then and I am dumping a new load here today. Onde day I hope to go through my archives and compile a neat long post with all of the different ads and series together. Until then you will have to use the tags to see more of your favorites.

In this loas we see more of the Joys and Glooms series, which seem to have been drawn by Paul Fung Jr. (although he was pretty young at the time these started). At least it is consistent with the Fireball Twigg series I think he drew as well and the Blondie comic strip which he drew in the fifties.

There is also a new early 1941 Mr. Coffee Nerves that does not seem to have been drawn by Milt Caniff and Noel Sickles, which indicated that there was an effort to replace them when they stopped doing the series under the Paul Arthur name.

of course there are some more Mr. Coffee Nerves ads from his return in the late forties, when Lou FIne drew him. BUt more importantly, there is a whole new set of historicly themes ads by an artist I can't yet place from 1949.

Finapalooza

Saturday Leftover Day.

I first encountered Lou Fine when I read his final comic strip Peter Scratch I the Menommannee Falls Gazette in the early seventies. Later I found out how much of an influence he had been on a lot of artists when he was working with Will Eisner in the early forties. After that, I noticed his advertising work in the later forties and fifties. He had changed his style from one that was influenced by the early work of Alex Raymond to one that was influenced by the later work of Alex Raymond. Oddly enough, I have always been a fan of his later style, more than the 'lyrical' earlier style, which had much to much florishes for me. That may be because of my appreciation with Peter Scratch. Anyway, for many years his work on advertisement strips such as Mr. Coffee Nerves for Postum (shown here) and Sam Spade and Charlie Wild for Wildroot (shown here as well). On the Lambiek website they also state that he also did the Charlie McCarthy ad stripps, but I don't see that. I will include some of them here.

But it was only recently I found out he did another newspaper strip from 1959 to 1962, called Adam ames. Aldam Ames was a beautifully drawn soap opera strip in the tradition of The Heart of Julia Jones. Beautifully drawn and compelling stories, it doesn't surprise me that the good folk at Classic Comics Press (who do the great Julia Joes and Marie Perkins series) were hoping to do a reprint of that strip as well. Alas, the strips would require quite some restoration work and they e-mailed me it would be some time in the future before we see those. Which leaves me free to show you some lesser quality, but still very pretty samples myself.

I am using Stan Jones' compilations of Newspaper Archive strips for that. Stan has been doing what I am doing here privately for some time, collecting runs of intereting strips and making them avaiable to his group of followers. Since he is using the same Newspaper Archive copies I had collected, only more completely, I have no problem using his hard work. Fortunately Adam Ames, a pretty detailed strip, was reprinted laregr than others in some papers, which means the scans here are quite good for this sort of thing. Looking through lots of microfiche material over the last year, I have found that some of the lesser strips seem to have cast themselves in that role by literally delivering less ink than some of the more famous ones. Ray Bailey's Bruce Gentry is quite close in quality to Steve Canyon (which has the same subject and the same drawing style, since Bailey started out as an assitent to Milton Caniff), but it seems to have been made to be reprinted smaller and probably cheaper and that makes it a lesser effort. On the other hand, his later strip Tom Corbett was as big and beautiful as Caniff's strip and went nowhere as well. So you never know.

I have also added some other rare Fine material I found, a signed illustration for a story in american Weekly magazine. This shows his late fifties style quite well. I have two more of those when you follow the Lou Fine link. I am also adding a page for Boy's Life magazine which could be by Fine, but probably isn't. He did work for the Boy Scouts magazine on the Space Conquerors, but all of the samples I have from between 1955 and 1965 are by other artists (with the bulk by George Evans), so I am guessing he did them later in the sixties. This strip is often mentioned as one of his creations, but I am not sure if that is completely right.

The complete first story of Adam Ames ran from July 6 1959 to Oct 26:

























I will return to these Charlie McCarthy strips at a later date. There also was another run of them in the early forties, which I still have to scan myself but I do have quite a few. as far as I remember they had a totally different style, much more cartoony. Still, having said that, I don't see Lou Fine's hand in most of these. Maybe the earliest ones from 1944, but he was busy doing The Spirit at that point and that would have taken al his time, surely?

Aug 27 1944:


Dec 17 1944:


Oct 6 1946:


No 17 1946:


Dec 22 1946:


Jan 12 1947:


Feb 2 1947:


Feb 23 1947:


March 16 1947:


March 30 1947:


From American Weekly, March 30 1958:


From Boy's Life, May 1965: