Angel The Jangel

Saturday Leftover Day.

Some time ago I shared the first and the last months of Gene Hazelton's rare Angel Face daily panel which ran from late 1953 to early 1954. Hazelton is a much admired artist and designer, who is probably best known for his work as the primary designer of The Flintstones as well as long runs as the artist on the Flintstones Sunday strip. In 1953 he started a Dennis the Menace style daily gag panel about a troublesome little girl, called Angel Face. The look and feel was very similar to Hank Ketcham's Dennis, but if you look closely you'll see he never imitates his style. It is a beautifully designed panel, though. Just as Dennis the Menace was. Recetly I came across another source, which allows me to fill in most of the issing months. I am starting with January, but there is more. I know that there are a lot of cartoonists whom I doing a favor. Please leave a message if you want me to get the rest.

Hey, Look! Drawings!

Tuesday Comic Book Day.

With the coming of Facebook, there are many places now where people can share their favorite of rare comic book covers, strips and stories. It is one of the reasons I have stopped doing that here. But At least here it becomes part of a search able collection and you can make your own path through them. Take todays post, a single story from the only comic book that Flintstones character developer and comic strip artist Gene Hazelton did. It's called Kid Carrots and was published by St. Johns. Scott Shaw! told me that Hazelton was told into producing it by fellow cartoonist George Crenshaw, who was doing comic book work for St. John himself. He confessed to Crenshaw that he found it too much work and dropped out after one issue. And 'too much work' is precisely what you can say about it. As good as Hazelton was at designing characters and even designing the comic strips and Sunday pages he did for The Flintstones, this is just a crowded mess of attention getting drawing. Terrific drawing, though and one would wish he had stuck to it a little bit longer.

Anyway, this is one of the stories from that single comic. I may be adding more later. In the meantime, you can click the links for more of Hazelton, the Flintstones and his single panel effort from the late fifties, Angel Face. Bill Wray swapped me one of Hazelton's daily Flintstone originals and it is a proud possession, That man could draw.

Pretty Face

Monday Cartoon Day.

Gene Hazelton is best know as one of the designers of the Flagstones, which was the original name for the Hanna Barbera series The Flintstones. He had trained at Disney and worked on several of their early features before leaving the company to go free-lance. I have shown a couple of his cartoons for Collier's, but they were clearly not enough to earn a living. From what I could learn on the internet, he worked as an animation designer for commercials in the fifties. After that he joined Hanna Barbera, where he not only designed the famous caveman family, but also drew for the Sunday and daily newspaper strip versions in the sixties. He also was the second or third artist on the Sunday only Yogi Bear strip in that same decade.

One of his rare solo productions was the newspaper panel Angel Face, drawn in his own style, but bordering on that of Denis the Menace. One of the many Denis knock-off of that period, I have shown a set of samples that had been doing the rounds on the internet. These undated samples were said to have been from 1957 (in their file names) and ever since I saw them I have been looking for more.

Imagine my surprise when I finally came across a longer run of this rare item from November 1954 to July 1955. The art itself does not seem to be any different than the samples from '1957', which begs the question if they could have been misdated. Sadly, my run of is incomplete because 1. the paper itself is not represented completely at newspapers.com and 2. the paper in which I found them (the Ogden Standard-Examiner) did not use all of it's gag panels every day. In fact, it is rare to have more than three in any given week. This also means that none of the dates in the 1957 samples (which do have a month and day notation, just not the year) double those in my run - which means it is entirely possible that the whole 1957 attribution is wrong. if not, the strip ran for at least three years and there are many, many more samples out there.

Now I have to warn you. The gags are never as funny as those in Denis the Menace. And frankly, the gags are not even Denis' best feature. Also, as good an artist as Hazelton is, he is not the graphic genius that hank Ketcham was. Even the worst of Denis' gags can be a graphic miracle, worth studying every time. On the other had, these gags do represent the only solo work by Hazelton we have and he does have a very alluring style.

So I am excited to have found these and I have gone through the trouble to represent all of them for you. Maybe I will finally come across one of the 1957 dates and we'll be able to see if that earlier set is a new one or not. Even though the panels are incomplete, it will take two Mondays to show all of them. Here is the first set.