Indiana's Little Sister

Thursday Story Strip Day.

Bob Oksner was talented artist who never seems to have reached the peak of his talent except when he was working in a scaled down version of his own style. In the forties he broke through with a well drawn adventures strip in a mild variation on the Milt Caniff style. From what I have seen the problem with this strip seems to have been that it was with a very small or uninterested syndicate. Every sample I have seen is badly colored, many are in a badly truncated two tier form (the only strip I know that made the two tier version by only dropping the first panel from the three tier and adding two the other two to the rest, creating a very ugle two times five panel grid which could be reprinted smaller than the two times four panel one. I have stated before that I find that almost every strip looks better in the three tier version, which probably is because it breaths air into the strip. This ten panel two tier does just the opposite, as you can see below.

Nevertheless, these strips are highly sough after, which I why I have never bought any. Too expensive for my taste. These samples are all from the backs of other stuff I was scanning. Now i wish I had more, because they do look nice.

A Boone To Mankind

Friday Comic Book Day.

Bob Oksner was a respected and talented artist, who is mainly known for his work on DC's Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis titles. He had three seperate newspaper strips in three seperate fases of his career. In the late forties he worked on the daily and Sunday strip Cairo Jones, in the fifties he did a shortlived I Love Lucy daily series and in the late sixties he drew Soozi (a strip he apparently did not like himself and could not get rid of soon enough). I have shown samples of all of these. In between he did tons of jobs for DC, veering from outright funny to light realism. And usually featuring pretty girls. In the mid fifties he did four issues of a unique Pat Boone comic book, also from DC, which featurd not only comic book stories, but also illustrated text features and fashion pages. A bit of a throughback to a genre that was more popular in the late forties, I have to say, but the style was unique. The comic book stories had no borders and no text balloons as such. Oksner used his most illustrative style for them, producing a forgotten but highly remarkable gem.

Female Illustrator

Thursday Story Strip Day.

I have done posts on Bob Oksner's forties adventure strip Cairo Jones twice before. Since I have some new scans that go in between those samples, I have copied both here to give you an overview of this series - ending in a set of not very nicely colored Sundays from 1947.