Showing posts with label Flyin' Jenny. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Flyin' Jenny. Show all posts

Saturday, January 27, 2018

A Marc Of Greatness

Saturday Leftover Day.

For a couple of years the FCA pages in Alter Ego featured a column by golden age comic strip artist Marc Swayze. It always bothered me that they never reproduced any of his work on Flyin' Jenny, the strip he took over from Russel Keaton. After a couple of years of collecting newspaper strips, I now know why. I only came across one color Sunday accidentally and none of the dailies. So when I found a short run of Flyin' Jenny dailies by Swayze I clipped them and tried to clean them up as best as I could. I am sad to say, they are still not at print quality, but at least you get to see some.

Friday, November 28, 2014

Ghost

Thursday Story Strip Day.

Even though he had a column for many years in the Fawcett section of old time comics magazine Alter Ego, very few samples of his time spent on the comic strip Flyin' Jenny have been shown. Most of tht is porbably due to the fact that there are so few good scans out there. Flyin' Jenny was an aviator strip started by Russel Keaton. Quite a good and popular one, that was reprinted several times. In the early forties Russel fell ill and the strip ws ghosted anonymously by Gladys Parker (who later came to fame with her own girl strip Mopsy). Like Russel, she exelled at doing a special dolls panel underneath the Sunday strip. The fact that these (a feature in several newspaper and comic strips in those years) are highly collectable might explain why so few Sundays have survived. They have either been cut to pieces or saved by fashion collectors. Marc Swayse took over in 1944. When Russel died later that year he was allowed to add his name to the strip. But after the war it lost it's attraction and it disappeared in 1946, leaving Swayze no choice but to return to comics.

I have been clipping and collecting his Flyin' Jenny over the years. There are some quite nice ones among them.