Likeness

The Look of Love: The Rise and Fall of the Photo-Realistic Newspaper Strip, 1946-1970

Ken Bald's work on Dr. Kildare and Dark Shadows set the standard for capturing likenesses in syndicated strips. This panel illustrates Bald's approach: reliance on a relatively small stock of art-o-graph traced photographs for the necessary star resemblance, other male figures based on Polaroids the artist posed for himself, and the transmutation of his wife, sometime actress and model Kaye Dowd, into the elegant female lead, often ending with a dramatic closeup. Of course, such proficiency was a long time in the making.

Ken Bald's history follows the same pattern found again and again in these strips and their artists, the New York urban childhood, early promise and a practical art education, a furious apprenticeship in a comics shop, war service, a return to comics after the War but soon a lucrative period with far better paying Madison Avenue and advertising jobs at Johnstone and Cushing intervenes, until a shot at a nationally syndicated strip, the big break, the major leagues, the dream job comes along.

According to Jim Steranko's History of Comics, volume 2, Kenneth Bruce Bald was born on August 1, 1920 in New York City and raised in the nearby suburb of Mount Vernon. After completing 3 years at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 1941, he follows Bill Ward and many other classmates across the Hudson River to Jack Binder's renovated barn studio in Englewood New Jersey that was providing secondary features for Fawcett, then the most widely selling line in the country. (In 1943 Captain Marvel sold a million copies per issue, 2 issues per month.) The Fawcett staff, led by main artist C. C. Beck, handled the lead character and Bald initially was part of the army of Pratt-trained talent, but after only a month, he became de facto Art Director for Binder and successfully guides the studio in rolling out backup stories for Whiz and Wow comics like Captain Midnight, Spy Smasher, and Bulletman, the one most responsible for melding the many individual styles into a coherent house style. Solo penciling and inking credits for Bald as listed in Maurice Horn's World Encyclopedia of Comics also included Doc Strange, Doc Savage, Black Owl, Fighting Yank, and Captain Battle for various publishers.

Most artists associated with Fawcett, even the moody, more illustration-minded Mac Raboy, Pratt classmate Kurt Schaffenberger, Binder, and Marc Swayze, were noted for the clean, simplified storytelling and rendering style Beck and Fawcett art director Al Allard favored, sort of Chester Gould crossed with Caniff without the heavy blacks or drama. Bald was no different. His work while crude in some respects, was straightforward and already showed a "flair for main figures and development of a smooth inking style" many admired.

In December 1942 Bald volunteered for the Marine Corps and saw action in the South Pacfic, with the war's end and discharge finding him in the Far East, a freshly promoted Captain and Intelligence officer. Sometime during his war service, Bald married Kaye Dowd, sister of Vic Dowd--an A.B. Davis High School, Binder, and Timely teammate for Bald (and at Timely, an advertising artist alternating career gal Hedy Devine credits in Millie the Model with Ed Winiarski). Kaye was a New York based actress who starred in Republic Pictures' An Angel Comes to Brooklyn, a musical comedy released in the fall of 1945.

When Bald returns to the US and resumes his career in February of 1946, he moves over to the shop Beck operated jointly with Pete Costanza, although which location, Beck's Manhattan studio or Costanza's New Jersey one, has not been verified. He freelances and picks up assorted assignments, learning like many returning veterans the industry was bursting at the seams with artists looking for work. He moves away from Fawcett to spend most of his energy for Stan Lee and Timely, gaining experience in all genres. According to the Grand Comic Book Database, his name appears on stories for Blonde Phantom, Captain America, The Human Torch, as well as romance lines like Millie the Model, Miss America, and Willie.

Of note, he was listed as the cover artist for a variety of titles which show a marked talent for pretty girls, the rise of Good Girl art in American comics that characterized the post-War pre-Wertham period: Blonde Phantom #17 and 18; Namora 1-3; Sun Girl 1-3; Venus 1-4. He's named as the principal illustrator for Stan Lee's inside 1947 look at the industry, Secrets Behind the Comics, but most believe the 96 page primer is mostly a collage from many hands the likes of Syd Shores and others.

During this period Bald was a busy freelancer, not associated with any one shop or title exclusively, and taking whatever traditional illustration jobs came his way too. Most of his comic credits are covers for the American Comics Group ('46-54), Adventures into the Unknown, Forbidden Worlds, Out of the Night, and Operation Peril, appearing with other ambitious fresh talent like Leonard Starr and Al Williamson. His art shows the growing sophistication prevalent throughout comics, looking like a junior Dan Barry who--while three years younger than Bald--had become the benchmark for steady employment due to his work in crime comics of the late 40s and the revived Flash daily in 1951. Firmly established at Johnstone and Cushing by the early 50s, earning a page rate five times higher than comic books, Bald still must have felt the main chance, a nationally syndicated strip, was slipping away.

Top, A Nat Champlin photo of the Jack Binder Shop at play, 1942, from TwoMorrow's The Fawcett Companion and Alter Ego #3. Bald is furthest left, second row. The second man on the right, same row, is Vic Dowd, the brother of Bald's future wife, Kaye, as shown in a publicity still, middle left, from her Hollywood days. (The hyperlink shows a production still from her major starring role.) When Bald returned to comics after the War, now working for Stan Lee at Timely (Marvel), he reveals his talent for pretty girls. Bald contributed many fine Good Girl Art covers, not only Sun Girl #2 as shown, but Namora, Blonde Phantom and Venus. In 1949, he makes a switch to focusing on straight illustration and eventually Johnstone and Cushing where he continues to freelance for various publishers until Judd Saxon debuts in 1957.

In the first three years of the strip, Bald upped the realism ante considerably from his previous work, perhaps to keep up with other Cushing alumni also trying to woo an audience as the decade opened. Marketing copy for the unusual business-oriented strip promised readers that young-man-on-the-make Judd Saxon was well versed in using his brains, looks, or fists to work his way to the top. Fight scenes turned out to be rare, but attractive females were found in abundance, the high pressure, high stakes premise allowing a seductive co-star to appear in every storyline.

At the time Judd Saxon was created, the competition was fierce for realistically drawn strips, for story or comic-style advertising. The early 50s had seen comic supplements become lucrative advertising forums. A 1951 industry survey revealed comic sections filled with ads paid for itself and even made money for its host. This profitability spurred the rise of art services like Cushing and Johnstone who provided work that was indistinguishable from the better drawn strips, and in some ways, even more compelling because the artist wasn't yoked to the daily grind of narrative. Some artists were finding both the spoils and burdens of success. Juliet Jones was at the peak of its popularity, being reprinted overseas and was the most popular strip, of any genre, in several countries, but by mid 1955 its creator Stan Drake was exhausted and the trail of assistants, ghosts, and stats appeared. That pace didn't deter others from trying to mimic his success. Win Mortimer and David Crane debuted in '56 with old school Cushing staffer Creig Flessel's stint to begin in 1961. Starr's On Stage began in early '57. Another old, well respected name, Lou Fine, entered the fray with Adam Ames in 1959, to be joined soon by former Drake ghosts Alex Kotzky in 1961 and the kid, Neal Adams, in 1962. Not a Cushing member, but certainly no slouch, Frank Thorne replaced the initial artist on Dr. Guy Bennett in 1956, his first strip in 1951, the very Rip Kirby-derived Perry Mason. Thorne called the seven year stint on Bennett the most grueling of his life.

King Features comics editor Sylvan Byck was known to have a marked preference for Raymond styled realism. This is a daunting level of craft, for any artist. The best Bald had been able to get from Byck in early 1956, when yet another submission was rejected, was that the next time a likely winner emerged, Byck promised he would call the 36 year old artist, as the editor had done earlier for Thorne with Perry Mason and with Drake. Byck was intrigued by the spate of movies and books that had recently appeared at that time, like The Man with the Grey Flannel Suit, Executive Suite, and Cash McCall. To Byck, Americans seemed fascinated with the glamour and uneasy morality behind Big Business and the self-assured, booming pre-Sputnik economy, and Byck reasoned that a contemporary Horatio Alger character, who "by brains, hard work and ambition, make[s] his way to a position of power and prominence," would be welcomed. He tapped former newspaper crime and sports reporter Jerry Brondfield, who had some mild success writing stories for mass market magazines, TV and Radio, as well as with RKO-Pathe, to write the scripts. And for the artist, Byck remembered to call Ken Bald.

Judd Saxon began on April 18, 1957 and would run for six respectable years, ending in August 1962. As pop culture would rediscover again in the heyday of the night time soaps on TV, Dallas, Dynasty, and Knot's Landing, greed is easily understood motivation. The hero, Judd, began in the strip as a low level functionary but with great desire. The "business" of these strips usually concern revolutionary formulas, false sales estimates, victimized investors or inventors, comely daughters, canny shop foremen, traitorous vice presidents and cold-hearted mistresses. As the strip progressed, Judd acts as a general troubleshooter, called in whenever there's a lot to lose, but always ready to stake everything if the reward is great enough. As he explains to one reluctant manager in the 2nd storyline in July of 1957, "Nobody'd make much progress if someone didn't risk something."

For Bald, the time spent on Judd Saxon was a time of experimentation, especially the first three years. Although he was a veteran, respected artist, with a host of credits behind him in comic books and advertising strips, when he began the strip he didn't venture too far from the popular norm. Saxon initially looked no different than any other in the Raymond Rip Kirby school: the figures were encased in a confident outline, with plenty of concrete solid blacks. For example, the top lips of the female characters were always inked in, with a single highlight on the lower lip, the mouth closed, or in several stock half-opened expressions to indicate talking or smiling. Hair was massed solids, brunettes indicated by arabesque black shapes. Details of the world surrounding the characters, like an automobile, buildings, landscapes, read "real" but not startling so. As the strip progressed, Bald studied Drake and gradually we begin to see the line work gymnastics necessary to bring photo realism to the panels, to try to render the different

surfaces the eye responded to in a photograph. Drake called this time consuming process of study and craft "attention span;" Adams said it brought a "texture" to the work that was hard to define.

The first two single panels in this section are roughly two years and six months apart. Look at the difference, in variety of rendering and composition.

Every account says Bald "abandoned" Saxon when the opportunity came for another, surely bigger King feature, an adaptation of a hit TV series Dr. Kildare, a show that had appeared a year earlier and showcased a hot young star, Richard Chamberlain, and was already generating lots of secondary products like coloring books, paper dolls, and paperbacks. Saxon was not a bad strip, but it seemed never to have gathered the popularity necessary to launch a Sunday or broaden its list of papers. Kildare looked like a sure bet.

Brondfield is credited with occasionally scripting the rival physician strip for another syndicate, Ben Casey, but leaves comic strips when the Jerry Caplin-Adams collaboration ends in 1966. Thereafter he writes general interest books on Big Ten sports and becomes editor of Scholastic, a position he held until retirement.

His Girl Peggy These late strips show the light, airy, yet very tight style Bald would take to Kildare and beyond. They also show the experimentation with line techniques that were necessary to the style. Bald could render a fashionably thin woman as sexy--a difficult feat in comic strips. (Drake, for example, kept supposed model Eve Jones short and voluptuous in a 50s manner, even as the fashion changed considerably around him and her a decade later.) Bald's women, in particular Judd's regular feisty companion and co-worker Peggy, were done with early 60s, dark haired chic, think Mary Tyler Moore or Jackie Kennedy. Bald's trademark saw tooth squiggle on the nose, to indicate the flare at the tip, starts in the 1960, a trick from fashion illustration. Previously his pert noses for females had been drawn so small that they were reduced to two lonely dots in any panel POV further than a close up. (See 11-28-58 above.) October 1962 would see Bald begin Dr. Kildare.