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The Rules of Attraction |
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The Look of Love: The Rise and Fall of the Photo-Realistic Newspaper Strip, 1946-1970
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Romero |
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The How to Murder Your Wife panel above is from Alex Toth’s trade paper promotion--the film features artwork done in the necessary photo style by Mel Keefer whose other strip credits include Perry Mason, Dragnet, and Gene Autry. (Keefer was a guest at the 2007 ComicCon. See below). One thing many of the best photo-realistic strips have in common is Phillip “Tex” Blaisdell backgrounds. Blaisdell did the backgrounds at one time or another for Hal Foster (!), Drake, Starr, and Prentice. (Even Raymond once asked him to be his assistant.) Drake often mentioned that Tex was an integral part of the look of Juliet Jones. Here are some very nice panels the versatile Blaisdell inked over Bob Oksner pencils for Angel O’Day's first appearance in Showcase #77, September 1968 (Thanks to Mike Harwood for the ID). Next, a sampling of other strips, including Lou Fine's Peter Scratch, a How to Murder Your Wife strip from Keefer's website, Frank Thorne's Dr. Guy Bennent from 1958, Creig Flessel's David Crane, John Cullen Murphy's Big Ben Bolt, a Hart Amos' Sunday for Air Hawk and the Flying Doctors, and Jorge Franch's short-lived collaboration with Jim Lawrence, The Secret Heart (first called My Romance) from mid-1973. The Apartment 3-G below is from 1963. |
End of the Era
1965's How To Murder Your Wife
starred Jack Lemmon as incredibly successful cartoonist Stanley Ford, whose strip detective “Bash Branigan” captivated the
entire nation with sexy escapades and over-the-top violence. The movie,
written by Hollywood veteran George Axelrod (Seven Year Itch, Will Success Spoil Rock
Hunter, Breakfast at Tiffany's, The Manchurian Candidate) and co-starring
Virna Lisi (Brigitte Bardot had turned down the role), lampooned all the characteristics of Adventure and Soap
photo-strips (resembling perhaps only Lou Fine's Peter Scratch, itself
almost a parody of the genre), including Ford’s need to photograph the hero’s adventures
for every sequence to insure accuracy in his strips and the change to a
cartoon-ish
almost gag-a-day “bumbling husband” domestic feature that prompts the
demise of the fictional
spouse.
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I find the movie ironic and anachronistic on several levels.
Dick Ayers revealed
in 2003 on a comic-art related message board that he had done similar artwork
almost 20 years before the movie for a TV playhouse (1948) adaptation called "The
Comic Strip Murder," which makes sense
in keeping with the character's outrageous wealth and
celebrity status as portrayed in the movie. Even
before Ayers' admission and considering the 60s James Bond additions--the
silly spy caper that opens the movie, the remote control gadgets, and the
blonde temperamental foreign actress--I
have always thought the premise belonged to
a much earlier time, of the dashing man-about-town
Raymond and his singular detective Rip Kirby, combined
with a nod toward the national spotlight then on Caniff and his straight arrow aviator Steve
Canyon at the time. (Canyon had seven articles in national magazines like Life,
Newsweek and The Saturday Evening Post in 1947, including the
cover story in Time on Jan 13th.)
Although the mid sixties were the high point
for photo strips, time was running short. Prentice, Starr, Drake,
Kotzky and Williamson all win major industry honors from 1965-'72, but they also see a sizable drop in number of papers carrying their
work--Drake saw his client list go from over 600 papers in 1960 to 324 (107
Sundays) by 1972 --a disturbing trend that
quality doesn’t stop, perhaps the biggest signal that public taste was
shifting under their feet.
Almost every cartoonist since interviewed believed improved
primetime dramatic shows on TV were the main culprit, but other factors were
present as well. Newspapers were hemorrhaging readers. Figuring they
had to chase the occasional newsstand buyer instead of the daily reader, they cut
down the number of narrative strips they carried and those story strips they did carry
were 
squeezed to twin 3 column
blocks. Editors advised the syndicates to shorten the sequences (some
Sunday sequences in
Casey and Kildare are just seven weeks long. The short lived Secret
Heart was a new story each week) and simplify the art.
A major newsprint shortage occurred in 1973 and many papers never regained their
original size and scope. The quality of Sunday color reproduction, always a
concern, dropped even further. Many major city papers folded or merged with longtime rivals, meaning less outlets. The rise of the fan press in the 60s and 70s saw
several 'zines dedicated to simply assembling strips readers could no longer
find locally.
There was a profound change in the
comics profession. The money just wasn't
there in syndication anymore. No longer did the
best artists look to a national strip as the ultimate goal in economic terms,
but as well a strip no longer meant following the 
footsteps of a ultimate
professional role model the way so many of this era viewed Raymond, Caniff and Foster. The level of craft
necessary for a photo strip took years of experience to master, a
tremendous amount of time day in and day out to create, yet now offered only a
limited canvas. Thus it became a commitment the younger generation of artists
and fans found easy to dismiss.
This type of change and progression has happened in other forms of creative mass entertainment as well, film, story magazine illustration, radio, jazz, Broadway and Hollywood musicals, Tin Pan Alley pop songs, all left behind by the general public in one form or another. Yet the work endures. In a recent article about the Great American Songbook, the writer Terry Teachout, quoting Noel Coward's line from Private Lives about "how potent cheap music is," remarks "there was and is nothing cheap about the immaculate craftsmanship" the composers, lyricists, and performers of that era consistently displayed.
Likewise I see nothing
cheap about the art these men and women created for their
strips. I see them as the last craftsmen of a great tradition.
In 1970 Jim Holdaway dies suddenly and Romero takes over Modesty. Rip Kirby, On Stage, Juliet, Apartment 3G, Kildare and Corrigan go on through the decade and well beyond, but with a greatly diminished luster. Neal Adams would do his last X-Men, then begin the Green Lantern/Green Arrow series that Spring of 1970. Gillon's 13 Rue De L’ Espoir ends in 1972.
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The era, whether anyone sensed it or not, was already over.
Sources
This page originally
was connected to several other link and bibliographic pages throughout the main
long ago defunct website. Those other pages have not been restored, so what follows is only
a
partial list of the sources I have used in the course of writing these pages and a few others recently published. I tried within
individual articles to provide identifying credits on my sources in the 
text
or alt tag and to address the questions about available reprints I have
received through email. Strips, daily and Sunday, unless otherwise noted, are clipped
tearsheets purchased through various collectors.
Please understand I am only presenting a representative selection of the many outstanding strips of the period. This is not meant to be an all-inclusive list or reference. If you have a specific question, correction, or update, please email me. The magazine Comic Art published an edited version of the Rip Kirby piece in its second issue in 2002.
For out of print items contact my very good friend Stuart Ng at Stuart Ng Books [info@stuartngbooks.com or http://www.stuartngbooks.com ]
Menonomee Falls Gazette
(MFG 1971-77) A long-since departed 232 issue 11 3/4" X 16 3/4"
tabloid which collected a week’s worth of
then-running adventure strips, as well as selected runs of soaps and vintage
strips, both US and overseas. (Including Prentice Rip, Corrigan, On Stage, Juliet Jones, Ben Casey,
Kildare, Modesty, et al).
At its peak the Gazette carried close to 50 strips, mostly dailies, in two 24 page
sections. An indispensable resource. There are indexes available. Also from Street Enterprises (the
team of editor Jerry Sinkovec
and associate editor Michael Tiefenbacher), there was for a short period the Menonomee
Falls Guardian (142 issues), a companion publication that published humor strips,
the
magazine format Comic Reader, and one shot collections of Rip Kirby,
Prince Valiant, and The Cisco Kid.
Comic Strip/Comic Book Art
The Artists
Alex Raymond (1909-1956) 
John Prentice (1920 -1999) --tribute by Jim Keefe
Stan Drake (1921-1997)
The Heart of Juliet Jones,
Avon S386, (1969), contains
one re-arranged story from 25 April to 8 August
1966
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| The Essential Stan Drake Top row, The 1969 Avon paperback contains what might be Drake's favorite story, a Juliet romance. In other Drake pieces, samples from this 1966 story (and this period 1965-66) reappear and it also seems lovingly spared from the ruthless cutouts Drake practiced throughout the 70s and 80s. Unfortunately the paperback re-formatting of the panels one or two per page and cheap paper do not do justice to Drake's exquisite renderings of Juliet and Eve this story features. The 1967 Sunday on the cover is not part of the included story. The 10 page first of four Cartoonist PROfiles interviews, middle, contains a dozen samples from this prime period on slick paper, along with reference polaroids and a Sunday photographed from the originals. (This issue also contains interviews with Jack Davis, Stan Lee, and a Grim Natwick piece.) Kelly Green graphic novels #1-3 are common. #4, shown right, is sometimes harder to find. #5, "La Filibuste De La B. D., " about a brutal S/M murder during the 1986 San Diego ComicCon, was released only in Europe. Likewise in the bottom row, #1 of the 3 volume Arcadia series is fairly easy to locate. #2 and #3 are vastly more difficult, with #2 especially prized and relatively expensive. #2 includes a short Sunday sequence (the second made) and a guest modeling appearance by colleague and lifelong Drake pal Bob Lubbers. Futuropolis, a French reprint comics company, issued in 1984 a two volume H/C set of Juliet Jones which takes the strip further into 1955 than the three Avon volumes. The reproduction of these two volumes is very good and the trimmed strips (usually cut at the KFS copyright notice) are 3" tall X 11" wide. The small inset of Eve above is from The Cartoonists Cookbook (1966). |
Leonard Starr (1925- )
Neal Adams (1941- )
Alex Kotzky (1924-2000)
Ken
Bald (1920- )
Jim Holdaway (1927-1970)
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| Over the past 3 years, I have tried to obtain some of the many excellent European reprints with mixed results. These strips were exported to many other countries and were very popular. ( Almost half of this website's visitors, for example, consistently come from fans overseas.) I wish I had better access to editions published outside the United States of US strips. And for non-US strips the situation is almost heartbreaking. These three books represent the only reprints I know for Jim Holdaway's Romeo Brown, a strip many come to this page to find. Here in the US, the Mononomee Falls Guardian reprinted a week's worth of Romeo in its first 38th issues, replacing the strip in issue #39 with Gus Arriola's Gordo. The Guardian's run began with the "Romeo Goes West" story from 1959. Since this page was first posted, I have been contacted by several comic strip clubs/collectors who privately print non profit authorized story collections. If you have a serious interest in vintage British strips and have a strip collection yourself to share (a no exception requirement of these fan clubs), I can pass your email address along. |
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Enrique Badia Romero (1930-
), Spanish School, Jungle Girls, European Girl Strips
Removed 1/6/05 by copyright holder request
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| Jane in Print According to the website's traffic reports, a day doesn't go by without at least half dozen visitors coming to this page (The deleted Romero "Nude Girl in Danger" or Holdaway's Madame X too) looking for anything about Jane, Mike Hubbard, or John M. Burns' later mid 80s revival. Jane, to my knowledge, has only had two reprints. In 1976 the complete Jane at War was published. The newsprint trade paperback features a cover by Hubbard, an introduction by Cliff Parker with some additional illustrations on the back cover, including Hubbard's final strip from 1959, a WW II timeline, and 14 Norman Pett stories. The reproduction appears to be from good quality source material. In 1983, in conjunction with a BBC TV series starring Glynis Barber as Jane, a very small 112 page softcover was produced, with just two stories--the poorly reproduced 1940 "Hush-Hush House" (which the TV series was based on) and one better quality Hubbard story "Nature in the Raw" from September 1951 (a sample above). As part of a 50 year commemorative in 1995, a condensed version of the earlier complete war adventures was produced in several different formats. These used a variation of the same Hubbard cover as before (and a Hubbard pinup back cover) and the same title, Jane at War, but contained only four stories, all Pett, "The Day the War Broke Out" (Sep '39), "Land Girl (May '41), "Married by Proxy" (Oct '43) and "Summer Idle" (June '45). Recently revived Tease magazine (#7, 1997) published an article by Steven Dorfman called "Not So Plain Jane" which used artwork (with new gray tones) from the books above and included a couple of Burns' 1985 Jane strips. There's a 224 page book called Jane: A Pin Up at War by Andy Saunders, but it focuses on Christabel Leighton-Porter, the woman who happened to be Pett's figure model for 20 years. Pett was only a fair comic style draftsman and his use of Leighton-Porter would be unrecognizable if we didn't know her real identity (which was never a secret or mystery even then). That's not where the appeal of Jane lies in my view. |
Paul Gillon (1926- )
"Special Paul Gillon" Revue
du Salon International de la bande dessinee No. 10 (1983)Al Williamson (1931- )
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