Monday, February 28, 2011

The Line King

Monday Cartoon Day.

I am continuing my look at Al Hirschfeld cartoons in newspapers on NewsArchive. Towards the end of the sixties, use of Hirschfeld caricatures to promote movies dwindles. Fortunately, the publication in 1970 of The World of Hirschfeld prompted a whole load of articles, using illustrations of that long since out of print book.










Sunday, February 27, 2011

Bad Hair Day

Sunday Meskin Measures.

Today, we have one of those bad scans. Maybe someone can send me a better one (hint-hint). This is a very fertile period for Mort Meskin though. With lots of spotlights and fistfights. I particulary like the design of The fiddler, who looks like he really could be a villian, despite of his silly name and gimmick.










Saturday, February 26, 2011

Cartoon Fun

Saturday Jacovitti Day

This one took slightly longer, but here is another of Jacovitti's chef d'oeuvre Popjac.

The Peet That Roared

Little Saturday Extra.

In october last year I came across two charming Bill Peet articles from Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse Club Magazine. Bill Peet was an important storyman for Disney in the fifties, who left after a dispute with the boss over Junglebook and made himself a nice new career as children's book writer and illustrator.

Since then I have run across other articles written and ilustrated by Peet in the same magazine. Enough to make me belief he might have been in every issue from a certain point in the second year. One of these pieces is the next part of one I showed earlier, the last one a particulary impressive mouse tale.

If I had a blog that was devoted to animation, I would hunt down all of these issues and make a list or do an article on all of them. Hey, if someone asks, I still might.

Follow the tag for the others.







Friday, February 25, 2011

Ormay on the Oksnay

Friday Comic Book Day.

As promised, here is more of Bob Oksner's career. We start with a late sample of his version of Bob Hope's Adventures. By this time, it had become hard to distinguish Oksner's style from that of the previous artist on this series, Mort Drucker. Decades earlir, Drucker had started out as a stand-in of Oksner, working on the same strips in a similar style. But by now, Drucker had become a superstar Mad artist. Much of Drucker's early career has not been chronicled, since he started out as a filler artist on staff at DC. But I'll get to that someday, today we do Bob Oksner. Next tuesday, I will show some of Oksner's later newspaper work, but here we have a sampling of his comic book career.



























At first I had another Bob Hope story here, but BookSteve alerted me to the fact that it wasn't by Oksner. The GCD gives it to Carmine Infantino and that is very possible (although I can't see it myself). I had looked there, but didn't scroll past the credit for the cover, whch is by Oksner. And I did notice it was different from his earlier work. But the two issues befre that had been by him and I just assumed this one was as well.

Well, rather than remove it and convine it to blogger limbo, I thought I'd let is stand as another view of Bob Hope. More Oksner after that, though...


























Oksner had also worked on the earlier issues of Bob Hope, doing several fillers such as Miss Beverly Hills of Hollywood, which also was a solo book series. The latter especially was Oksner at his best. For those of you who only know him as the artist of Angel and the Ape or the revival of Plastic Man, this may be a revelation.










After that, Oksner worked on Leave it too Binky, a fairly lightweight series. Then he tried his hand at a more serious style, doing stories for sf titles Strange Adventures and Mystery in Space alongsized DC greats such as Alex Toth, Carmine Infantino and Gil Kane. He was also on eof the original team of artists working for DC's new war titles, before 'new' talents such as Joe Kubert, Ross Andru and Jerry Grandietti joined the roster. Impressive as these stories are, Oksner returned to lighter tyle again for The Adventues of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, which he stuck with for many years (including the Sgt. Bilko books). All in all a fascinating artist, whose ease with brush and pencil sometimes hurt his artistry.