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Cartoon Monarch: Otto Soglow and The Little King is a long-overdue examination of the unique pantomime cartoons of Otto Soglow, who entertained millions for more than fifty years and whose influence remains current in the works of Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes, Ivan Brunetti, and others. To be published in February by IDW’s Library of American Comics, this compendium features 432 pages of Soglow’s most famous creation, The Little King—plus the complete run of The Ambassador, the strip that preceded the King in the comics pages.
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Oct 12 11 12:18 PM
DavidTai wrote:According to IDW, Otto Soglow and the Little King is up next: http://www.comicsbeat.com...-otto-soglow-collection/
Oct 12 11 12:24 PM
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Nov 10 11 1:13 PM
TONY WEARE by David Lloyd The late Tony Weare drew Matt Marriott in the London Evening News from 1957 to1977. Written by Jim Edgar, it was the finest and most atmospheric newspaper strip about the American Wild West that has ever been produced.Tony was one of just a very few strip artists here and in the US whose creative identities owed nothing to the heritage of stylisation which influenced many other newspaper adventure strip creators - he was primarily an illustrator who just happened to love drawing strips.His style on Marriott was that of a sketch artist - a portrayer of the instant. It was naturalistic, raw, and unsophisticated - perfect for depicting the primitive quality of a realistic-looking Wild West. One of his major strengths as a strip artist lay in his consistently creative compositions. If we look through the three-frame strips that make up the Matt Marriott stories we see no evidence of the repeated formulas of picture design which some strip artists use. Because of the sheer weight of material most of these craftsmen have to produce , easy options in picture composition are often sought by them and repeated to ease the burden of emitting a constant stream of new layouts ; but when we look at Tony's work it's as if we're just watching people going about their business through a lens that he has cleverly positioned for us, not viewing figures which are overtly posed for appropriate effect. The way he rendered his drawings reflected this 'realistic' approach to portraying the action, with almost lazily handled brush work and pen cross-hatching. He also had a superb command of light and shade, which promoted the impression that he was drawing something he could see in front of him, rather than something he'd built up from his imagination.The only things Tony ever hated drawing were mechanical objects of any kind, though this antipathy is very difficult for any viewer to detect. As a lifelong nature lover he preferred to draw the organic. This passion for depicting living things above all else, is what gives Tony's work the energy which shines from almost everything he put his brush to. Like all the best artists, he sought to draw only what he loved to draw.
TONY WEARE by David Lloyd
Nov 12 11 8:35 PM
Canwell: I expect we’ll do about twenty volumes – Steve Canyon essentially ran forty years and as with our Terry volumes, we’re collecting two years in each book. Given that our Dick Tracy series is up to Volume 12 and the phenomenal response to Rip Kirby convinced us to continue that series into its John Prentice years, I like to think readers will support Canyon and allow us to reprint the entire series.
Nov 13 11 3:40 PM
"the phenomenal response to Rip Kirby convinced us to continue that series into its John Prentice years"
That's extremely great, but I wonder:
Hasn't the response to Terry and the Pirates been phenomenal enough to convince them to continue that series into its George Wunder years?
Nov 15 11 6:43 PM
Pimp My Shelf wrote:My vote is for a LIBRARY OF BRITISH COMICS:
Nov 15 11 8:50 PM
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Nov 15 11 9:16 PM
Nov 16 11 10:42 PM
Nov 17 11 4:03 PM
The police adventure comic strip Radio Patrol ran as dailies from 1933 - 1950, with Sundays going from 1934 - 1946. It was written by Eddie Sullivan, and drawn by Charlie Schmidt. It featured the adventures of Sgt. Pat (the strip's lead character), police woman Molly Day, Pat's partner Sam, and the courageous young boy Pinky Pinkerton. Both Pat and Molly seem to be Irish cops, in the tradition of the era. Molly is intelligent, courageous and competent, and is definitely one of the least sexist characters in the comics. Both Sullivan and Schmidt worked for the same Boston newspaper, and the series took place unofficially in and around the Boston area, and the surrounding countryside.
Radio Patrol was organized into distinct stories. Each new story has a title, put in the last panel of the preceding story. As in many narrative strips of the era, the daily strips and the Sunday strips had separate continuities and story lines.
Radio Patrol gave rise to a radio show, and a movie serial: Radio Patrol (1937), directed by Ford Beebe and Cliff Smith, with Grant Withers as the hero Pat, and silent film veteran Wheeler Oakman also in the film.
Radio Patrol has some features that recall the adventure comic strips of the 1930's: continuing story lines, a serious tone, a handsome hero, occasional action scenes, richly drawn art. But Radio Patrol is quite different in feel from the sf adventure series popular in the 1930's, such as Flash Gordon, Brick Bradford, Don Dixon, or such comic book imitations of these as Brad Hardy. Everything in Radio Patrol is strictly realistic. There are no elements of science fiction or the fantastic, and everything takes place on realistically depicted Boston city locations, or in the countryside. Hero Pat is always in realistic clothes of the 1930's, such as police uniforms, suits, or working man's clothes, when he is undercover. So are the other characters. This differs from Flash or Brick, who often were in exotic garb of different civilizations. Hero Pat was not the sole protagonist character of the strip, the way Flash or Brick seemed to be to sole stars of theirs. Instead, the point of view in Radio Patrol was often shared among a large cast of continuing characters, such as Molly, Pinky, Sam or the Buster. Both Pat and all the other Radio Patrol heroes are full of brain power, unlike the sf adventure heroes, who seem to stress brawn and fighting. While Pat is strong and good with his fists, most of the advances he and the other heroes make are due to smart detective work, not muscles. Pat also seems more modest and down to earth than Flash and Brick. He is content to be dating Molly, while Brick always seems to be romancing some new exotic princess.
The scripts in Radio Patrol were more tightly constructed than those in most sf adventure series, too. Every plot event in Radio Patrol flows directly and logically from the actions of one of the characters. This character can be a series hero, one of the many villains in the stories, or a suspect in a case. The interactions of the characters, and the plot events they generate, make up the entire story line and action of Radio Patrol. By contrast, in sf strips like Flash Gordon and Brick Bradford, the heroes are often exploring a strange new planet or lost civilization, and this fantastic world furnishes much of the plot of the story. What the individual characters do has much less bearing on the plot, than the strange world or environment which they are exploring.
There is a wry sense of humor running through Radio Patrol. This is not belly laugh style gags. Rather, it is a sense of absurdity and irony among the characters. The scripts often point this out explicitly. A character's statement or attitude will be referred to by others as comic or as "comedy".
Nov 19 11 4:48 PM
Pimp My Shelf wrote:Hasn't the response to Terry and the Pirates been phenomenal enough to convince them to continue that series into its George Wunder years?
The response to TERRY has been phenomenal enough to convince us to do CANIFF and STEVE CANYON, but no immediate plans to do the Wunder TERRY (although anything is possible, eventually). Reasons being: [A] Dean, Lorraine, and I are major Caniff fans, so getting Milton’s work collected is a priority for us, and [B] while I’m probably prejudiced, I believe the visual/narrative drop-off from Caniff-to-Wunder on TERRY is far more noticeable than the same drop-off from Raymond-to-Prentice on RIP.
Re: possibility of inexpensive trades, more Blondie or more modern strip reprints:
POINT THE FIRST: We released our first Library of American Comics (LOAC) paperback — THE BEST OF DICK TRACY — earlier this year, and we’re watching its performance very carefully. Even before BEST OF TRACY, we’ve talked about the possibility of doing a batch of LOAC paperbacks, as well as trying out some experimental formats (how’s that for a tease? Can’t say any more about “experiments” right now, but …). We continue to have those discussions. One problem is, there are only so many assets — time, money, staff members — to be expended, so our ability to launch projects has its limits (already, our motto is: “Sleep is overrated!”).What you wrote makes me think you may be assuming a correlation between BLONDIE/format/sales and coming to a potentially-misleading conclusion. BLONDIE Volume 1 sold nicely for us (and continues to sell); we expect Volume 2 to perform just about as well. Our plans from the outset were to do two BLONDIEs, then pause and decide where to go from there. As you know from Volume 1, the original BLONDIE material is so different from the “familiar” BLONDIE everyone knows, we wanted to make sure the market was there for The Great Old Bumstead Stuff. So we’ll release Volume 2 (which I found great fun, by the way — I’d never read much of that material before the book started coming together!), then we’ll take a look at sales. If the signs all look positive, BLONDIE could go on from there, much in the same way we’re doing a BRINGING UP FATHER companion volume next year because the first one did so well.POINT THE SECOND: An excellent question about more modern strips and whether they’d sell enough in paperback format to make them viable. Right now, WIZARD OF ID and BEETLE BAILEY have started appearing in hardcover from a non-LOAC publisher (I bought my copies straight from Westfield, where I’ve been a customer for *mumble-mumble* years!). I think the “more modern” strips aren’t getting full attention right at this moment in part because there is so much amazing older stuff that urgently needs and deserves the best treatment we can provide it. I’d bet this doesn’t mean strips like B.C. and HI & LOIS won’t get their day in the sun, in one format or another — but they _will_ have to wait their turn.
POINT THE FIRST: We released our first Library of American Comics (LOAC) paperback — THE BEST OF DICK TRACY — earlier this year, and we’re watching its performance very carefully. Even before BEST OF TRACY, we’ve talked about the possibility of doing a batch of LOAC paperbacks, as well as trying out some experimental formats (how’s that for a tease? Can’t say any more about “experiments” right now, but …). We continue to have those discussions. One problem is, there are only so many assets — time, money, staff members — to be expended, so our ability to launch projects has its limits (already, our motto is: “Sleep is overrated!”).
What you wrote makes me think you may be assuming a correlation between BLONDIE/format/sales and coming to a potentially-misleading conclusion. BLONDIE Volume 1 sold nicely for us (and continues to sell); we expect Volume 2 to perform just about as well. Our plans from the outset were to do two BLONDIEs, then pause and decide where to go from there. As you know from Volume 1, the original BLONDIE material is so different from the “familiar” BLONDIE everyone knows, we wanted to make sure the market was there for The Great Old Bumstead Stuff. So we’ll release Volume 2 (which I found great fun, by the way — I’d never read much of that material before the book started coming together!), then we’ll take a look at sales. If the signs all look positive, BLONDIE could go on from there, much in the same way we’re doing a BRINGING UP FATHER companion volume next year because the first one did so well.
POINT THE SECOND: An excellent question about more modern strips and whether they’d sell enough in paperback format to make them viable. Right now, WIZARD OF ID and BEETLE BAILEY have started appearing in hardcover from a non-LOAC publisher (I bought my copies straight from Westfield, where I’ve been a customer for *mumble-mumble* years!). I think the “more modern” strips aren’t getting full attention right at this moment in part because there is so much amazing older stuff that urgently needs and deserves the best treatment we can provide it. I’d bet this doesn’t mean strips like B.C. and HI & LOIS won’t get their day in the sun, in one format or another — but they _will_ have to wait their turn.
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