Showing posts with label 1948. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1948. Show all posts

16 September 2020

Finally, The Bear Begins (No, Really)

Okay, let's try this once again, eh? 
We're talking about the odd origins of The Bear as a feature in Treasure Chest Of Fun & Fact.

One of the things that was quite unusual about the beginnings of the Bear is that he started as a text feature. And that's how he appeared for his first few years. The Grand Comics Database will tell you that The Bear first appeared in the latter half of volume 5, but that's not accurate. He had his premiere tale late in v.4 -


As you may have noticed, though Postal Regulations only require two pages of text, TC0F&F actually used those pages for more than mere filler and decided they needed three pages every issue.
 
The Bear had several tales in text form before he graduated to comics...
 







The most indicative of his popularity was El Vaquero -
 

This one would seem to show that these stories were quite popular indeed. And not simply because they promoted him from required filler text to comic stories.
After all - when's the last time you saw a comic's text pages take the cover of the book?


That's pretty freakin' amazing, as the saying goes.

Another odd little note - While the comics stories are written by Eric St. Clair, he used the name Ray St. Clair while doing the text stories. 

pages from Treasure Chest Of Fun & Fact v4 #18, v5 #s 12 & 18, v6 #s 10 & 17, v7 #12, v8 #s 7 & 14, and v9 #1 (1946-1951)

11 July 2020

Fighting Blogger For Dale

Hey!
It looks like we get a post today after all.

So far, the biggest effect of the latest Upgrade to blogger is that the image uploader is even more frelled than before.

It used to be that the uploader would hang on a few images in the batch and just spin its wheels. So, the easy fix was close the window, then open it again and let it reload what was there. Then you could grab the couple/few it missed.

But now, when you close the window and re-open, it doesn't even try to remember what it had been doing - so start all over again and cross those extraneous digits. Maybe it'll get 'em all this time.

Half an hour later, we've got all the pages, but by now my mind has wandered and i've got no clue what i was going to write about them. So, those of you that dread wading through my blabbage to get to the comics, Thank Blogger.

And those of you who might actually wonder what i had to say - Thank Blogger, but in a different way.

Here's the complete run of Lucky Dale - Um...  something something something. I forgets...







While setting the tags, i realized that one of these stories ran here before from when it reprinted in Space Detective. Although Dale only had 5 stories, she appeared over a dozen times with reprints.

page art from The Saint #s 1, 2, & 4-6 (1947, 1948, 1949)

04 July 2020

Happiness Is A Punched Cow

Sorry - all out of Warm Puppies. (I think Blogger strangled them during the "upgrade" - but i finally was allowed to upload all the images for this post) 

Once upon a time, 73 years ago, Cow Puncher Comics appeared on the range...








Cow Puncher Comics featured a wide variety of material, from edutainment features like Trail Tales...
 


...to cartoon comedy like Dead-Eye Dude...
 

...and deranged satire like Wild West Ro-di-dos... 


And, of course, there was Western Adventure, as seen on the covers. And the "Star" of the book - the only person to have their name on the cover - Twice - was Kit West. We'll come back to her since she deserves a solo post. Today, let's dig out a hidden gem - Alabam

Alabam only appeared twice, so we'll do both while we're in the neighbourhood. Here's his first tale...


So - did you spot what makes Alabam so special from a modern perspective? If not, this beautiful splash features Joe Kubert's signature quite prominently for you -
 

As you might have sorted from the cover gallery above, there were only seven issues of Cow Puncher Comics. But we'll be back soon to visit Kit and the others.

page art by Jack Warren, Joe Kubert and ??? from Cow Puncher Comics #s 1-4 (1947, 1948)