This comic book story by Lou Trakis appeared as filler pages in Katzenjammer Kids issue #20 published by Standard Comics in the Spring of 1952.
I don't know anything about the artist, but he sure knew how to draw comics with a carefree, breezy look!
Click on the pictures below to see BIG Hi-Res scan of each comic book page
I just really enjoy the loosey-goosey, bouncy-silly look of these drawings. After scanning through hundreds of pages of old comics, these just jumped right out at me.
The artist is obviously very skilled, but he's not slick in the slightest. That's a good thing.
I love the goofy faces with the wonky expressions. The faces of all the characters looks the same, but he makes up for it by giving each one a very distinctive costume and hat. Very primitive...like a Bazooka Joe comic.
No "art" here, no subtle characterization.
Nothing new or groundbreaking.
But it made me smile. I hope it made you smile, too. ___________
Well, this story was a pleasant discovery...some really top-notch freaky pre-Marvel sci-fi/horror comic book pages from the King of comics, Jack Kirby.
This is from Alarming Tales #1, September 1957
Published by Western Tales, Inc. and Harvey Features Syndicate. This comic book story is one of five tales in this all-Kirby extravaganza. If you get a chance to lay your paws on this comic book, get it! It's a winner through and through!
As usual, CLICK on any one of the pages below to see a large-size kooky Kirby comics page.
It looks like Kirby spent some time inside Steve Ditko's fevered imagination before drawing this story! Clearly, Jack Kirby knew how to draw those kind of extra-dimensional landscapes many years before Steve Ditko drew them in Marvel Comics' Strange Tales with Dr. Strange.
This 1957 comic book story was drawn just a few years after Richard Matheson wrote the short story "Little Girl Lost," but it was five more years before this imagery showed up on the Twilight Zone when "Little Girl Lost" was adapted for TV in 1962. I wonder if "doorways to another dimension" was a popular pulp-fiction theme at the time.
As usual, CLICK on any one of these pages to see a large-size comic book page.
Whew! That was a close one!
Would you like to see more stories from this comic? Leave a comment below and let me know what you think! Thanks...--Sherm
Sugar Bear was always one of my favorites (along with Quisp, the Freakies, The Trix Rabbit and Cap'n Crunch), and now Dan has created a photo set of the design evolution of Sugar Bear! There are many diffferent design approaches, and each one of the artists really knew how to draw a cute and appealing cartoon character. Fantastic stuff -- go take look!
PS...Dan Goodsell is also the author of one my all-time favorite cartoon art books, "Krazy Kids' Food"
...and another great website devoted to Cereal Box characters is:
"Solar Plexus - Interplanetary Messenger" from WEIRD Comics #2 - Fox Publications, May 1939
Click on picture above to see a nice BIG comic page !
This "story" is so weird and inexplicable I just had to share it. I don't know who wrote or drew this (other than "by Jupiter"), and I don't know if there were more than two episodes with this character.
Click on picture below to see a nice BIG comic page !
All I know is that this 2-page bit of weirdness was the only thing that jumped out at me from this whole comic, and got me asking all kinds of questions like: Did this book have an editor? It's just so much fun and loose and insane...it reads like phone doodles!
Nice cover, though!
PS...I found an earlier episode of Solar Plexus - Interplanetary Messenger in WEIRD Comics #1, and I include it below just to satisfy your curiosity. It doesn't appear to have anything to do with the haiku-like hallucination above, and I found it entirely unremarkable...except that it wallows in the pool of utter nonsense as well.
Click on any picture to see a nice BIG comic page !
If anybody out there has any more info on who might've done this, please let me know. In the meantime, enjoy the ride!
Last month, a whole lot of CartoonSNAP readers (from all over the world!) downloaded Dan Gordon's Cookie Comics story from Cookie #20, so I decided to go back to the very first issue of COOKIE Comics to see how it all started...
Cookie Comics #1 was published in 1946 by Michel Publications of St. Louis, Missouri. 48 pages plus covers for only a dime.
Instead of putting up little thumbnails of the pages, I picked out some of the best panels from the story to show you up close. There's a link at the bottom of this post which you can click to download all the pages in one file.
Meanwhile...here's a sample of what you'll find inside Cookie #1--
Contrast in character design ________
Check out the shadow under the old guy's beard. Really makes it pop! His head is as wrinkly as his suit!
Foreground + Middle ground + Background = DEPTH of staging He does this in almost every panel.
Silly situations, funny drawings and painful violence. That's a cartoon!
Dan Gordon poses = mayhem
So much action and movement! In the panel above, notice how the colorist pushed Angelpuss back into the background by coloring her in monotone.
...and these detail shots are from a Jitterbuck solo story:
(check out the SOLID construction and anatomy on that dog!)
I love that shadow against the fence as the dog is climbing up! Dan gordon puts in a lot of blacks like that in his inking which really gives his drawings a super-solid feel. The shadows also let us know that the dog's right leg is toughing the fence, but his left leg is still trailing behind in mid-air.
You don't notice these details while reading the story because they go by so quickly, but if you stop and admire any of these pages in detail, you can really see what a master craftman and master cartoonist Dan Gordon was!
See that big black shadow on Jitterbuck's leg? You can just feel the weight of that dog against Jitt's body! Even the cans are rendered differently. And the light source is consistent and well-planned to give everything weight. But it's still so cartoony!
Dan Gordon excels at drawing the backs of characters' heads.
If you like these samples from the comic, you can download all these stories at once below. I've been experimenting with different methods of posting these comics, so I'd appreciate it if you'll leave some comments to let me know what you think is easiest. I just don't want to make people have to click and save thirty different images, because it really bugs me when I have to do that.
Click on the COOKIE #1 COVER below to DOWNLOAD all of these stories in one convenient 67Mb PDF file
