As promised I am using my own scans and those of the Comic Book Museum to show you as much as I can of George Roussos' epic 15+ year run as the artist of General Electric's give-away comics on the subject of electricity. Roussos used several artists to create these with, but in total they may represent some of his best solo work of his career. This first one seems to be the first he did and it seems to fit in nicely with his style at that moment (as can be seen from the samples of the newspaper strip Judge Wright, which he took over from another artist later in the forties. Follow the link to see those.
Showing posts with label Judge Wright. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Judge Wright. Show all posts
Sunday, October 30, 2016
A Shot In The Arm
Sunday Meskin Measures.
As promised I am using my own scans and those of the Comic Book Museum to show you as much as I can of George Roussos' epic 15+ year run as the artist of General Electric's give-away comics on the subject of electricity. Roussos used several artists to create these with, but in total they may represent some of his best solo work of his career. This first one seems to be the first he did and it seems to fit in nicely with his style at that moment (as can be seen from the samples of the newspaper strip Judge Wright, which he took over from another artist later in the forties. Follow the link to see those.
As promised I am using my own scans and those of the Comic Book Museum to show you as much as I can of George Roussos' epic 15+ year run as the artist of General Electric's give-away comics on the subject of electricity. Roussos used several artists to create these with, but in total they may represent some of his best solo work of his career. This first one seems to be the first he did and it seems to fit in nicely with his style at that moment (as can be seen from the samples of the newspaper strip Judge Wright, which he took over from another artist later in the forties. Follow the link to see those.
Friday, March 25, 2016
Heroic Save
Thursday Story Strip Day.
After Fred Kida left Boy's Life (possibly to do the newspaper strip Judge Wright) his job as the artist for the real life scouting hero stories (most of the time called Scouts in Action) his place was taken by a collegue of his from Gleason's crime books, Bob Fujitani. Similar in style, but less obviously inpspired by Milt Caniff.
After Fred Kida left Boy's Life (possibly to do the newspaper strip Judge Wright) his job as the artist for the real life scouting hero stories (most of the time called Scouts in Action) his place was taken by a collegue of his from Gleason's crime books, Bob Fujitani. Similar in style, but less obviously inpspired by Milt Caniff.
Thursday, June 04, 2009
Even when wright is wrong he's all right
Thursday story day.
I have been showing some of Mort Meski's comic book work for the last couple of fridays and I will have a couple of interesting early DC stories tomorrow. Toayspost is related to that.
Mort Meskin was good friend wih artist George Roussos for all of his life. Roussos started very oung, helping Meskins later partner Jerry Robinson on Bob Kanes Batman. He soon developed a reputation as a quick and capable inker. All thorough the fifties he worked in that capacity, smetimes even doing stories with Meskin (but not as much as you would suspect). But he also did a lot of solo work, most of which was better inked than drawn. He was a very capable storyteller, but his figure drawing was peculiar to say the least. He did some of his best work for the GE line of informational comics (some of which I showed in an earlier post), producing at least one a year from the late forties until the late fifties. He also did solo stories for Timely/Atlas and other companies. He ended up at DC, together with Meskin, where his art improved as much as Meskin's was dumbed down until there was a point that they were not very easy to tell apart anymore. When Meskin left DC to go into advertising in the mid sixties, Roussos moved to Marvel, where he worked as an inker and ended up as a very much loved colorer and color coordinator. More about his career can be found in a special section of the Mort Meskin website at mortmeskin.net.
In te late forties, Roussos worked in the newspaper strip Judge Wright for a short time. It is common knowledge among comics historians to say that all comic bok artists wanted to work in newspapers more than anything, because of the respect and money) that would bring them compared to comic books. The newspaper artists looked down upon the comic book artists and often pure comic book artists were not a member of the newspaper strip artists' club. But like all common knowledge, this has to be taken with a grain of salt. As I am going trough Jerry Bails' Who's Who and Newspaperarchive.com I find more and more comic book artists who did work for newspaper strips for a short time and didn't leave comic books. Now if it was true that all comic books artists wanted was to be a newspaper strip artist, you would expect the to leave comics as soon as they had a strip of their own. Even if the strip only ran for one or two years. Who knows in advance how these things go? And they are supposed to take up all your time, so how can you even do comic book work on the side unless you employ assistants or work really hard and really late. It seems to me that the main reason for not abandoning comic book work would be financial. A newspaper strip is nice, but only if it pays the bills. And not every artist can afford to tough it out for a year just to get that respect. So my impression is that most artists would say they would love to have a newspaper strip, because it would give them more respect by their collegues. But what they really mean is that they would like to have had a succesful newpaper strip, so they too could hire assistants to do the work and go golf all day.
The list of artists involved both in comics and newspaper strips is long. Irv Novick did a long stretch of a strip called Cynthia in the late forties. Al Weiss took over Joe Jinks for aout a year. Bob Lubbers had Cairo Jones. Carl Hubbell and Paul Reinman worked on Merrie Chase. Before that Reinman did a stint on Tarzan. Submariner artist Carl Pfeifer did The Bantam Prince, which was a continuation of Bodyguard by former Quality artist Spranger. A.C. Holingsworth worked on Secret Agent X-9. Matt Baker did Flamingo. Mike Roy did crime stories while he still was doing The Saint. Drift Marlo's Tom Cooke started in comic books. Mac Swayse went from Captain Marvel to Flyin' Jenny and back again. Mel Keefer did Dragnet and Classics Illustrated. Frank Thorne did Perry Mason at the start of his career. And George Roussos took over Judge Wright when they couldn't pay the artist who started it anymore.
Here are te last two weeks of the strip and three from the week before that.
Thursday story day.
I have been showing some of Mort Meski's comic book work for the last couple of fridays and I will have a couple of interesting early DC stories tomorrow. Toayspost is related to that.
Mort Meskin was good friend wih artist George Roussos for all of his life. Roussos started very oung, helping Meskins later partner Jerry Robinson on Bob Kanes Batman. He soon developed a reputation as a quick and capable inker. All thorough the fifties he worked in that capacity, smetimes even doing stories with Meskin (but not as much as you would suspect). But he also did a lot of solo work, most of which was better inked than drawn. He was a very capable storyteller, but his figure drawing was peculiar to say the least. He did some of his best work for the GE line of informational comics (some of which I showed in an earlier post), producing at least one a year from the late forties until the late fifties. He also did solo stories for Timely/Atlas and other companies. He ended up at DC, together with Meskin, where his art improved as much as Meskin's was dumbed down until there was a point that they were not very easy to tell apart anymore. When Meskin left DC to go into advertising in the mid sixties, Roussos moved to Marvel, where he worked as an inker and ended up as a very much loved colorer and color coordinator. More about his career can be found in a special section of the Mort Meskin website at mortmeskin.net.
In te late forties, Roussos worked in the newspaper strip Judge Wright for a short time. It is common knowledge among comics historians to say that all comic bok artists wanted to work in newspapers more than anything, because of the respect and money) that would bring them compared to comic books. The newspaper artists looked down upon the comic book artists and often pure comic book artists were not a member of the newspaper strip artists' club. But like all common knowledge, this has to be taken with a grain of salt. As I am going trough Jerry Bails' Who's Who and Newspaperarchive.com I find more and more comic book artists who did work for newspaper strips for a short time and didn't leave comic books. Now if it was true that all comic books artists wanted was to be a newspaper strip artist, you would expect the to leave comics as soon as they had a strip of their own. Even if the strip only ran for one or two years. Who knows in advance how these things go? And they are supposed to take up all your time, so how can you even do comic book work on the side unless you employ assistants or work really hard and really late. It seems to me that the main reason for not abandoning comic book work would be financial. A newspaper strip is nice, but only if it pays the bills. And not every artist can afford to tough it out for a year just to get that respect. So my impression is that most artists would say they would love to have a newspaper strip, because it would give them more respect by their collegues. But what they really mean is that they would like to have had a succesful newpaper strip, so they too could hire assistants to do the work and go golf all day.
The list of artists involved both in comics and newspaper strips is long. Irv Novick did a long stretch of a strip called Cynthia in the late forties. Al Weiss took over Joe Jinks for aout a year. Bob Lubbers had Cairo Jones. Carl Hubbell and Paul Reinman worked on Merrie Chase. Before that Reinman did a stint on Tarzan. Submariner artist Carl Pfeifer did The Bantam Prince, which was a continuation of Bodyguard by former Quality artist Spranger. A.C. Holingsworth worked on Secret Agent X-9. Matt Baker did Flamingo. Mike Roy did crime stories while he still was doing The Saint. Drift Marlo's Tom Cooke started in comic books. Mac Swayse went from Captain Marvel to Flyin' Jenny and back again. Mel Keefer did Dragnet and Classics Illustrated. Frank Thorne did Perry Mason at the start of his career. And George Roussos took over Judge Wright when they couldn't pay the artist who started it anymore.
Here are te last two weeks of the strip and three from the week before that.
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