He'll Be Back

 Saturday Leftover Day.

 Last week I shared the last few weeks of Win Mortimer's work on the 'religious' soap opera David Crane (concieved and written by Mart Trail's Ed Dodd) and the first weeks of Craig Flessel's version. I promised more and here it is. 

After more than ten years on David Crane Craig Flessel left to go and do other stuff (including work for Playboy). The change in his style indicates he had less time to spend on it, so the number of papers carrying this one popular strip may have dwindled beyond the level Craig found his worth his effort. 

But who to replace him? Well, as it happens the original artist Win Mortimer was not having the best time. After Crane he had left for his home land Canada, done a mildly succesful adventure strip and returned to the comics. I have not checked specifically, but from what I remember having seen he was not getting as much work as he used to. He may have been among the people at DC who were phased out and he did do some work on Marvels romance and 'horror' titles - but he was not suited for superheroes and may have been struggling. So... he returned to David Crane and continued it more than four years (but more about that later). He doesn't skimp on rendering, like Flessel did and makes the most of it.

The transition itself was smooth, so I think it was planned. The storyline ends on a saturday and the next Monday Mortimer is back. I don't have the Sundays for this period, so I don't know if the transition was in the same week of two weeks earlier (as it was last time). There is no goodby for Flessel in the last panel, except that the girl asks him if she will ever see him again. But he answers that he she will see him, because he will need help with his studies. Next Monday it is not him who's back, but David Crane and Win Mortimer.

But there is more to come... next week I will look at the last strips by Mortimer. The final goodbye.

Bait and Switch

 Saturday Leftover Day.

A while back I showed a couple of strips at the end of their run. I like those sad endings, especially if the artist or writer saw them coming and able to refer to the ending in the story - or at least hint to it. Around the same time I started looking at the moment when Creig Flessel took over from Win Mortimer on David Crane. Crane was written by Mark Trail's Carl Dodd, so he was not able to do a lot by way of goodby. Luckily Dodd did it for him.

The switch here starts at the end of a storyline, so it must have been planned. As you would expect in that case, the switch in the Sunday page starts three weeks earlier. In a remarkable act of cooperation, the paper ever acknowledges the switch by the second installment by Addin Fleissel's name in the credit line. The first Sunday is unsigned, but the church lady in the thord panel looks distinctly like Fleissel's work. The rest doens't really, so it may also be a case of Fleissel inking Mortimer's pencils.

But that is not all of the story. Ten years later, Fleissel left the strip to work for Playboy (what a switch). A new artist replaced him, or not really a new one... you will see in next week's Saturday episode of this blog.

Shine The Light!

Saturday Leftover Day. 

I have always been an admirer of Creig Flessel's work. Not only because of his slick realism with a hint of cartooning) or his funny cartoon art (with a hint of realism), or his reliable work for the Johnstone and Cushing company on the Eveready ads or the comic section in Boy's Life , or his funny Sundays and mature storytelling on the dailies of David Crane in the sixties, but mostly for the fact that he had been there all the time. The man worked on the first DC comics as an artist and editor, even. He was still alive when I was starting this blog and developing an interest in the forgotten history of comics and I can kick myself blue in the shins that I didn't contact him to talk about everything besides superheroes (where most interviews he did sadly concentrated on).

In the early forties he was one of the artists asked to contribute to the Story-of-the-Month daily syndicated series of illustrated bestsellers. The art is solid, a lot more so than most of the comic book art produced at that time. No wonder he ended up in the much more lucrative commercial art field.