Can Little Bobby Draw?

I ran into one of those old debates again - did Bob Kane draw Batman at all?

Kane fought so hard for so long to hide the work of great artists like Dick Sprang and Jerry Robinson, not to mention Batman's Co-Creator Bill Finger. As more and more came to realize that their favorite parts of Batman came from other creators, speculation arose that Bob Kane never actually did any of the work on Batman. With all those Ghosts in the closet, perhaps he never needed to do more than sign a name and collect the checks.

But, let us remember that Bob did do more than just Batman.

For example, Jumbo Comics was running his Peter Pupp back in 1938. Oddly enough, those were reprints. The strip first ran in the UK in Wags the previous year. So here we have international proof that Bob could draw comics. (No, i don't know what was in his closet. Shut up!)

If the pages seem just a bit "off" to you, it may be because they were printed as Colour Comics. Which is to say, they were printed on orange paper, which looks rather garish and diminishes ease of reading. So i leeched that out and 'upgraded' to black & white -

Um...
I don't have issue #4. I can't tell you what happens next.

But i'm fairly sure no bats were involved...

page art by Bob Kane from Jumbo Comics #s 1-3 (1938)

Ad-Ventures, Not ADventures

As you may know, we occasionally run ADventures - comic strips made as advertisements like Volto, "Pepsi" the Pepsi-Cola Cop, and "RC" and Quickie.

A little over 80 years back, Rafael Astarita decided to reverse the formula and make comics with pre-existing advertising figures. He called these Ad-Ventures, and they ran in Star Comics for a bit starting in 1937. It didn't last too long - only 8 episodes total. We've got 7 of them here today...

Before we continue, let's answer the most obvious WTF? that may be on the minds of some readers...

...the Gold Dust Twins sold laundry detergent. Search hard, and you might find some images with one of them scrubbed so clean he turned white. 

Now you know, and we continue...

Oops.
I'm missing issue #8 - so we must skip one.
On to the final strip from Star Comics #9 -

 Of course, these days he'd be sued out of business over Intellectual Property rights.

page art by Rafael Astarita from Star Comics #s 2-7 & 9 (1937, 1938)

Star Gazing With Feg

Feg Murray was quite the interesting fellow. A skilled portrait artist, he gained national fame with his newspaper strip Seein' Stars - essentially a Hollywood trivia magazine in comic strip format. It was insanely popular for many years, and like many popular strips it was reprinted in comic book form.

But, before that, Feg was a medal winning Olympic Athlete (1920 Olympics). Not exactly your usual desk-bound artist. Let's cube a three and check out some of those old strips. How many big stars do you still recognize eight decades later?

Depending on how you count, that's about half of the Seein' Stars strips we have sitting here. (The count gets confused because it switched to a 2-page spread format) The other half will be moseying along directly...

page art by Feg Murray from various issues of Ace Comics between #s 13-49 (1937-1941)