Heroic Fraction

Saturday Leftover Day.

What to pick for my saturday representation. I have been busy scanning and have quite a nice backlog.How about a selection of one of Burne Hogarth's most forgotten strips? In the late forties, after dowing Tarzan and before doing Tarzan, Nurne Hogarth created two new strips. When he left Tarzan in 1945, due to a dispute with his syndicate, he tried and action-adventure strip of his own, called Drago, about a young Argentine nobleman battling post war Nazis in South America. Not a succes, but that may have been due to the lack of muscle his new syndicate (Robert Hall) had. He returned to Tarzan and at the same time launched a new, comical strip. Miricale Jones is best know for supposedly featuring the first work of Bernie Krigstein, as one of his assistants. Hogarth tought at the Cartoonists and Illustrators School (later the School of Visual Arts) in New York. One of his students was Al Williamson and I reckon I see some of his style in the shape of some of the panels here. Was that in influence on Williamson, or did Williamson assist Hogarth. I don't think the latter is possible timewise.

I never had seen much of these Sundy only strip, except for a couple of black and white illustrations (and even a reprint in muddy greys), so I jumped at the opportunity when these came up on eBay. I had not seen half of them were in French from a Canadian paper, but the pictures are just as nice (and I can read French). The colors are a bit less vibrant, which is partly due to the fact that the Canadian tearsheets have browned more, but possibly also because the printing was less. It is something I have seen before on other strips, with one paper even dropping one of the three main colors. I have also include one page both in French and as an American three tier with the bottom of the panels dropped. That must have been one of the official versions offered, but boy, does it look ugly.

Burne, baby, Burne

Tuesday Comic Strip Day.

In the late forties Burne Hogarth was teaching sequential art at the New York Art School. One of his more famous pupils was Al Williamson, but there were many more, most or all of which were taking this night school on the GI Bill. Hogarth did not only draw the Tarzan strip at that time, but also tried two times to make it ig with a new, more personal offering. The first one was a pretty serious strip called Drago, the other a more funny outing called Miracle Jones. Hogarth was known to use his students as assitants for a little money or credit and one of them was later comic book giant Bernie Krigstein. His style is not to be found here, but apparently he assisted briefly on this strip. The scans I have, come not from the comics section, but the magazine section of one of the papers on NewspaperArchive. That means they were a bit hard to find, so I ahven't got all of them (and on eonly partially, but I didn't want to leve it out). But it also means that most of them were reprinted in black and white. I don't think there would be a book in these (although I am still trying to get hold of the Drago bok done years ago), but this surely is a candidate for a complete reprint section of the Comic Journal. If they can find a good run somewhere, of course.

Anyone have some color sample to share?