Lone Sundays

Saturday Leftover Day. 

 Many years ago (in 2009 and 2010) I clipped and shared all of Warren Tufts short run comedy sciencefiction strip The Lone Spaceman. Reportedly, he did this after leaving Casey Ruggles and before staring Lance, to fill out some sort of contract. Anyway, it's a hoot and a very good satire. It was also a daily only strip, or so I thought. A couple of years later I found three samples of a Sunday version. Quite find I would say, because they seem to have been (and until now unknown) addition. 

On closer inspection, I found out that this was probably not an official Sunday, just a reworking of the daily strip in color. Maybe done for just one paper, which I had happened to come across. I never cleaned the three samples I have and didn't add them. 

But (you knew another twist was coming) upon giving them a closer look, I noticed that there were a few changes added panels. And they (as well as the coloring) were done so professionaly, they might have been done by Tufts himself. I still believe they were a one-off, not part of a lager syndication effort. Or maybe Tufts (a known tinkerer, with a mind and a will of his own) just did them to try out some coloring for his next project, Lance. 

And another twist, when I looked to colect the dailey belonging to these 'Sundays', I found I may have skipped the first four weeks of this strip in dailey from. I use a different online micro-fiche newspaper service these days, but fortunately this one had Lone Ranger as well - from the start on December 06 in 1954 to two weeks later, on monday 21. After that, it seems to have been dropped in that particulary paper (the Erie Times). 

I have collected the two weeks I could. Odly, the ,aterial used for the Sundays always came from the week after that. I'll do a comparison after each one. Sadly, the quality of the Erie Times-News samples isn't as good as the earlier ones I grabbed years back from newspaper.com. If anyone has access to that site, please have a look for me (and please grab those missing weeks for me).

On this Sunday, the changes seem to have been minimal. One of the panels is shortened (ever so slightly), the spaceship has been reangled and some of the dialogue is changed.

Since I don't have the Sunday or the full week of dailies of this week, I can say how much was used or even if this daily was part of the regular sequence (it seems a bit early for a recap).

 

On this first week of 1955, I have more from my previous post. As you can see, some of the art was reused, but some is also exclusive to the Sunday, like the fuller caricature of Edward R. Murrow. The first panel on the fifth daily has been expanded a bit and some of the dialogue has been adjusted. Noting much, but enough to suggest that the Sunday is indeed by Tufts himself.

How many of these he did, I am not sure. I am missing the Sunday for the first week and I am assuming that was there as well. It seems Tufts tried to sell a Sunday version seperately, but unless we find some more of these later in in the run, it is safe to say he quit doing them when they were nog longer profitable.

Serious Satire

Friday Comic Book Day.

Harvey Kurtzman's sixties magazine Help is often mentioned as a breeding ground for the later underground movement. But the same can probably be said about Pete Millar's drag cartoons magazines from the same period. With early work by Gilbert Shelton and Rick Griffin, it certainly paved the way for a certain sort of new amateurism. Looking back on it, I also see the same sort of egocentric hedonism that exemplefies all cultural manifestations of the baby bomer generation, underground comics included.

Whicj makes it all the more weirder that these magazines also published work by the arch conservative established artist Alex Toth. Working at Hanna Barbara, he was able to do some of his most personal and funny work for these magazines, probably because he was left alone and they were pleased to have him. I will not be showing these pages here (more than just a few to remind everyone), because they have been collected very beautifully in a book by Manuel Auad called One More For The Road. If you are anyway interested, you should try and get a copy.

What I am showing and will probably not be collected anytime, is the similar work done by fifties artist Warren Tufts. Mostly known for his realistic western strips Casey Ruggles and Lance. On the first one, he even used Toth as a ghost for a short time. In between those two strips he did a satirical space opera called The Lone Spaceman (which I showed here some time ago) and he ended up doing funny books for Dell and Western in the sixties. Like Toth, there also was a California connection. Anyway, his short stories for Pete Millar's magazines are as surprising as those of Toth.