Tag Archives: 1950s

A Bigger Barks: Taschen Supersizes the Duck Man

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Is a bigger Barks a better Barks? Taschen’s long-awaited Disney Comics Library: Carl Barks’s Donald Duck. Vol. 1. 1942–1950 supersizes the Duck Man, and we are all the richer for it. This is one of their “XXL” volumes, so let’s go to the tape. It weighs in, literally, at 11+ pounds: over 626 11 x 15.5-inch pages that include the longer Donald Duck stories from 15 issues of Western Publishing’s Four-Color series.  up to 1950. These include some of the greatest expressions of Barks’s quick mastery of the comic book format. In “The Old Castle’s Secret” (1948) he uses page structure, atmospherics and pace to create real suspense. His masterpiece of hallucinogenic imagination married to landscape precision surely is “Lost in the Andes” (1949). And his well-tuned sense of character is clear in creating a purely American icon of endearing greed in Uncle Scrooge in “Christmas on Bear Mountain” (1947). Of course we have seen these and many of the other stories in this collection reprinted before. So, to answer my own question, does scaling up Barks give us a better Barks?

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Elmo Gets Hairy

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Force-fed a new brand of cereal by his kidnappers that grows hair uncontrollably, Cecil Jensen’s country rube Elmo is awash in a pool of his own tresses. More on this strange late 1940s satire here.

Get Me to The Church on Time: Decoding the Postwar Cartoon Marriage Boom

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“It is a old comical strip trick – pretendin’ th’ hero gotta git married.” It keeps “stupid readers excited,” Li’l Abner claims in 1952. Days later he unwittingly weds Daisy Mae, ending a nearly 20 year tease. But this time it was no “comical strip” trick. In fact, several perennial bachelors of the comics pages fell in a post-WWII rush to the altar. Along with Abner, Prince Valiant, Buz Sawyer, Dick Tracy and Kerry Drake all enjoyed funny page weddings between 1946 and 1957. Comic strip heroes were just following the lead of the real-world heroes returning from WWII. Desperate to make up for lost time and return to normality, over 16 million Americans got hitched in 1946, the year after war ended in Europe and the Pacific. But each of these strips framed the new normal in American life differently. As the best of popular art often does, Vale, Dick, Abner, Buz, Kerry and their mates offered Americans a range of stories, myths really, about what this new normal meant.

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Alley Oop’s BFF: Chris Aruffo Reanimates the Caveman

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Chris Aruffo may not have planned to be a publisher, but somehow he managed to accomplish something that others couldn’t. In just a few years he published the full run of V.T. Hamlin’s Alley Oop dailies as well as Dave Graue’s run. More than that, he made the series affordable and used pristine source material for best possible rendering of this beautifully designed strip. Chris sat down with me recently to reflect on that experience. We discuss his history with Alley Oop, locating good sources, why this series comes in so many different dimensions, and can reprinting old comics make business sense? But with this interview we launch a series of interviews with reprint publishers where we brainstrom ways that 20th Century comic strips can be made relevant and inspiring to the next generations of comics fans and creators.

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Mad Men Angst: Dedini, Shulman and Self-Hating Suburbia

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You may not think you know Max Shulman and Eldon Dedini, but you have seen their stuff. Shulman was a comic novelist of the 1940s and 50s whose most famous, enduring creation was The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, a short story collection that became an MGM musical in 1953 and a genuinely witty TV sitcom (1959-1963). But throughout those those decades, Shulman was a bestselling satirist of mid-Century suburbia. His 1943 breakout college satire Barefoot Boy With Cheek was followed by The Feather Merchants, the Dobie Gillis collection and Rally Round the Flag, Boys!. In their Bantam paperback releases, many of Shulman’s novels enjoyed cartoon complements by Eldon Dedini, best remembered as a longtime Playboy magazine regular. His cartoon style is immediately recognizable: highly abstracted balloon faces, sharp triangle noses, bright watercolor washes. His lascivious satyrs were among jhis signature series in Playboy.

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They Had Faces Then: Close-Ups, 50s Photo-Realism and the Psychological Turn

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Stan Drake, The Heart of Juliet Jones

The turn to photo-realism in the adventure comics after WWII is well-documented and obvious in any review of the major strips. Alex Raymond’s Rip Kirby, Warren Tufts’ Casey Ruggles and Lance, Leonard Starr’s On Stage, Stan Drake’s Heart of Juliet Jones, John Cullen Murphy’s Big Ben Bolt are just some of the clearest examples. The stylistic foundation had already been set in the 1930s, of course by Noel Sickles (Scorchy Smith), Milton Caniff (Terry and the Pirates) and Hal Foster (Prince Valiant). They moved adventure strips away from the more expressionist modes of Gould and Gray, or the cartoonish remnants of Roy Crane (Wash Tubbs and Capt. Easy) or the sketchy illustrator style of a Frank Godwin (Connie). .But it is really in the post-war period that we see a clear ramping up of fine line, visual detailing, naturalist figure modeling and movement, as well as full adoption of cinematic techniques.

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EC Sci-Fi At Scale: Taschen’s XXL Weird Science

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The EC science fiction titles hold a special place in American pop culture. The books that ran from 1950 to 1955 (Weird Science, Weird Fantasy, Weird Science-Fantasy) were indispensable waystations for the still-niche genre of science-based speculative fiction. I would argue they were the crucible in which pop sci-fi as we have known it was forged. These comics not only popularized some of the foundational tropes of the genre. But EC’s stable of premiere artists then visualized many of these themes in ways that were far more sophisticated than the typically awful B- and C-level production values Hollywood applied to the sci-fi genre. Even though these comics were among the least popular of the EC titles, they likely were legitimating sci-fi in more young readers’ minds than any pulp mag or film c-lister could. And at the same time, artists like Wally Wood, Al Feldstein, Joe Orlando, Harvey Kurtzman and Jack Kamen were inventing a visual language for sci-fi themes: post-apocalyptic vistas, space travel, the romance of a starship launch, bug-eyed and fish-faced aliens. Their influence on the subsequent conceits of sci-fi fiction, art and film, as well as their look, is undeniable. From Forbidden Planet (1956) to 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Star Trek (1966), Star Wars (1977) and beyond, these comics were the first rough sketches of what our fantasies of the future would become.

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