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[movielover]

With the 200th week of the reading club, I went to a book numbered 200. Here https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=16122

Picked the Scorchy Smith story for the group.

(Truthfully, I tried for Four Color, but 200 is a Bugs Bunny book.)

[crashryan]

Collecting comics in the 60s, I sought out newspaper strip reprint comics like Famous Funnies and Popular Comics because they were the only way to find examples of uncommon strips like "Scorchy Smith" and "Dickie Dare." I admit I bought few FF's. The word was already out that Frazetta appeared in them and they were too expensive. Some issues cost as much as five bucks!

"Scorchy Smith:" I'm incapable of judging this strip fairly. Replacing greats like Noel Sickles, Bert Christman, and Frank Robbins with the likes of Rodlow Willard is appalling. He drew the strip for years and it never got any better. Being taken from a Sunday-only storyline makes the story read more smoothly than reprints cobbled together from dailies and Sundays. However it's nothing special. One confusing item is that the villain, Snyde, looks exactly like Scorchy Smith.

"Bobby Sox" is okay. I had to think about the first strip for a moment before I got the gag...Bobby stops being jealous of her cousin because the girl turns out to be an unfashionable hayseed. What confused me is that Bobby's cousin doesn't look all that gauche.

I like "Oaky Dokes", a newspaper strip I've never seen in a newspaper. Pleasant art. The continuity stories are more amusing than these one-pagers, but I still like 'em.

"Napoleon" almost never raises a smile, but the drawing is always top-notch.

Fran Matera does a decent job on "Dickie Dare." His style is less decorative than Coulton Waugh or Odin, more mainstream Caniffy. The story is disjointed, probably the result of aggressive editing. I never realized it until Matera broke it, but there is an unspoken rule about descriptive character names like J. Reginald Largetub. Neither the characters in the story nor the author can be aware the names are unusual. By playing on Largetub's name in a caption, Matera breaks the suspension of disbelief. Just think of all the heroes who could have saved themselves a heap of trouble by avoiding people with names like Wilbur Weezil.

Of all the features I enjoyed "Steve Roper" the most. The story is more complex than the others, and both writing and art are above average.

And speaking of art, who could object to a page of nice Frazetta? Is anyone out there familiar with modern life-saving techniques? Is this one still valid? Commercial of the Issue award goes to those wipe-clean cowboy/cowgirl outfits. Ee-yow!

[SuperScrounge]

Scorchy Smith - Nice.

Bobby Sox cartoons - Cute.

Oaky Doaks cartoons - Cute. 

Napoleon cartoons - Ditto.

Dickie Dare - Okay.

Polar Peril - A little dull.

Steve Roper - Sooooo.... Steve interferes with a police investigation by hiding evidence, the main suspect, and kidnapping a man... yeah... poor judgement aside an otherwise okay segment.

Red Cross New Method of Artificial Respiration - I don't remember ever being taught this clumsy looking method. How long did it last?

[positronic1]

At the moment I haven't had time to more than skim the issue, but a few things are notable. Famous Funnies, which at one time carried some decent features, was weakening, and it was probably easy to foresee it didn't have much time left in 1952. In just a few issues, it would be down to just Dickie Dare and Steve Roper for newspaper strip reprints, along with mostly unremarkable original one-off stories of war or adventure filling the bulk of its pages. Then in issue #209, they obviously tried to inject some more interest by bringing back Buck Rogers, with those amazing Frank Frazetta covers to grab the attention of kids browsing the newsstands. It's unfortunate that we aren't able to see the Buck Rogers strips from those issues here. But then I assume you wouldn't want to pick an issue where a number of pages needed to be removed for copyright issues, and that includes a number of the earlier (and better) issues as well.

Too little too late, obviously. By this time most of the better strip reprints had gone elsewhere, usually appearing under their own individual titles, like Dick Tracy or Joe Palooka at Harvey. Strips like Dickie Dare and Steve Roper were fine for the newspaper audience of mixed kids and adults, but they'd never be the drawing features that made someone pick one Sunday newspaper comic section to buy over a competing newspaper's comic section; the "must read" comics. They still kept going for years (decades in Steve Roper's case), so someone must have enjoyed them, but those things never even got cover-featured on FF. Earlier issues of FF seemed to have a much better line-up of strip reprints, overall, even if the bulk of better strips were more likely to be found in the comics books of publishers David McKay (who had the King Features characters) or United Features. Still, the marketplace had changed from 10 or 15 years earlier, and it was obviously difficult for FF to compete for readers' dimes in 1952.

[narfstar]

I prefer complete stories. I am not a fan of the strip reprints that only give you a few pages of a story then continue. I don't like the British comics for the same reason. The nice thing about being old reprints is that we had the rest of the story. I did read the next couple Scorchy's stories to get to the rescue. I actually thought the art was very good Crash. Maybe because I never followed the earlier artists on the strip. The story was fun, including the ending, if too stupid. I am always bothered by just plain stupid stuff being thrown in for fun. "just pull all the buttons" would never be said or done by anyone to fly a plane.

[lyons]

An entertaining story, coupled with a looser, more forgiving style of artwork makes Scorchy Smith an enjoyable serial to read.  From damsels-in-distress, rescues, mystery solving, gunfights, to spies and foreign aggression, Scorchy Smith takes the reader on hair-raising adventures all over the world.  Nice artwork, and a good read.  Thanks movielover.

[The Australian Panther]

I haven't read many of these older compilation style comics on CB+ but I always like to find newspaper strips in book form.
Scorchy Smith.
Rodlow Willard, if this is indeed he, is an excellent draftsman. Another new name for me to remember.  He got around.   
https://www.lambiek.net/artists/w/willard_rodlow.htm
Observations.
An Asiatic that speaks very good english. The times they were a'changing.
In the first 3 panels, we see Betty menacing a horde of villians with a small knife, somebody wields a gunbelt as a weapon and they all go down in a screaming heap. quickest fight I have ever seen. 
Since Scorchy and Cyril Snyde are drawn very much alike, and this is my first time reading the strip I found it confusing and had to go back and forward a bit to work out who was who.
Cyril's belting of Betty causes the reader to lose all sympathy for him,, so a good bit of writing.
You would need to be reading the book regularly to make sense of the narrative.
Same applies to the Dickie Dare and Steve Roper strips.
I wonder who the audience for these books was assumed to be? You would need to read the comic regularly to keep up with the story-line. If they were reprints from recent newspaper strips, many would have already read the strips.     
But good stuff.
When strips are reprinted in book format, they are often chopped up badly with attempts to squeeze them into the new format.
In this case somebody has gone to some trouble in reformating, so it works quite seamlessly, possibly Willard himself, since he worked a lot as an editor.
Bobby Sox. This has an unusual  gentleness of tone that I quite like.
Frank Frazetta, as a holder of a first aid certificate, I can tell you that, no, that technique is no longerused and is well and truely out of date.
Frazetta did a lot of odd things like this. A guess. This was like a paid Public Service announcement and Eastern Colour were paid to run it. Frazetta was probably paid by the Red Cross or the National Research council. Probably got a better page rate. I think he was shrewd like that.
I wonder what his relationship with Buster Crabbe was? He uses Crabbe here as his model. Wonder if he did it from life?
MovieLover, Good choice again!

     

[SuperScrounge]

I wonder who the audience for these books was assumed to be? You would need to read the comic regularly to keep up with the story-line. If they were reprints from recent newspaper strips, many would have already read the strips.

It seems to me the comics reprinted were like 3-5 years old. The 8-8 date on one of the Dickie Dare page would indicate it was a 1948 sequence.

Thanks for the info on the technique.

[positronic1]

I wonder what his relationship with Buster Crabbe was? He uses Crabbe here as his model. Wonder if he did it from life?

I wouldn't assume any relationship other than that of Frazetta being a fan of Crabbe's. Al Williamson also used Crabbe a lot, drawing his likeness most probably from black and white movie stills, which were easily gotten even in those bygone days. It seems like there was early recognition of a fan market for stills of various movie stars, and I think the movie studios were happy to release such stills as it was a form of publicity.

Then again, around this time Eastern Color also released a Buster Crabbe licensed comic book, and some covers were drawn by Frazetta, Al Williamson, and George Evans. It seems likely that the artists might have had access to stills provided by Crabbe's agent, although whether they ever met with Crabbe in person would be a matter of speculation. Here's a particularly nice rendition of Frazetta's from the cover of BUSTER CRABBE #5:

https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=69606

Al Williamson's illustration of Crabbe in the first story in that issue, "Buster Crabbe and the Maid of Mars" strikes me as particularly dead-on, although of course the accuracy of the likeness does vary from panel to panel.

[positronic1]

I wonder who the audience for these books was assumed to be? You would need to read the comic regularly to keep up with the story-line.

I was thinking exactly the same thing. It's interesting to compare earlier issues of FF, where each issue contained more different features, with fewer pages of each. When that was the case, it was easier for them to drop a feature after it had run for a while, in order to freshen things up by adding a new feature. As standard page-counts for comics became reduced, and the perceived demand was for more pages of an individual feature, the number of different features in each issue naturally declined. That was also because of the increasing emphasis on continuity strips, as opposed to self-contained gag features. At any rate, there does seem to have been an implicit assumption on Eastern Color's part that they had a built-in audience of regular readers who followed the comic from month-to-month. When they stopped featuring the most popular strip characters on the covers, and went to a generic gag cover, it was probably a bad sign. After all, this coincided with a slew of new titles from other publishers (and brand-new publishers) being released after paper rationing restrictions ended with the end of the war. How were they ever going to attract new readers if they weren't advertising the strongest contents of the issue on the front cover? Editorially, they seemed to be mired a bit in old-fashioned ways of thinking. I think they finally realized that when they brought Buck Rogers back with those eye-catching Frazetta covers, but by then, the readership had probably declined too much. That, and the trend of comics was going even more away from general anthology books (unless they had a specific genre theme like crime, war, horror, romance, or science fiction) to focusing on specific characters in their individual titles.

[positronic1]

I prefer complete stories. I am not a fan of the strip reprints that only give you a few pages of a story then continue.

That said, we really have a great advantage over the original readers of these comics. I went through loads of consecutive back issues of Famous Funnies, and pulled out just the pages from strips I liked once I discovered (GCDb is great for this) exactly which issues the strip began and ended in. Many of the strips have never been reprinted anywhere in dedicated collections in book form. A couple of FF features that I really enjoyed after compiling them (at a few pages per issue) were Invisible Scarlet O'Neil and Speed Spaulding (based on Edwin Baumer & Philip Wylie's novel When Worlds Collide). True, it requires a little patience and dedication, but once you have a basic list of issues to comb through, it only takes about a minute to click through the pages of a single issue, one page at a time, to find them. Often they appear in exactly the same spot in any given issue, and if you can figure that part out, you can almost jump to the correct page you're looking for accurately.

[lyons]

Comic strips ensnare me with their intertwined subplots, plot reversals, evil twins, and long-lost family members - enticing me to return regularly and forge deeper connections.  I find this especially true of the escapist entertainment printed during the 1930s.  Many of these strips have a compelling story, and are worth the read.

[The Australian Panther]

Lyons,
I Agree. We need to remember that the adventure strip business was highly competitive and having your own strip was financially and creatively desirable. Which means that these creators were masters of narrative. They knew how to take generic elements and hold your attention week after week. They had to. There are only a finite number of basic elements you can put in a story. Its like cooking - only a few basic elements but it's what you do with them that makes it delicious.  Its a shame that more current comic book creators don't go back and look at those strips and learn to tell a story well. 

[positronic1]

Its a shame that more current comic book creators don't go back and look at those strips and learn to tell a story well.

Not just the strips, but the short comic story. It was a sad day when "backup features" were discontinued, as that's how many artists and writers learned their craft -- how to tell a complete, well-crafted story in a limited number of pages. That's not to say there isn't a place for today's long-form, 'decompressed' storytelling, but too often the pacing is all wrong, and the stories are padded out of necessity. Understanding how to tell short stories helped writers and artists to understand the story elements that were really important.

[Captain Audio]

I wonder what his relationship with Buster Crabbe was? He uses Crabbe here as his model. Wonder if he did it from life?

I wouldn't assume any relationship other than that of Frazetta being a fan of Crabbe's. Al Williamson also used Crabbe a lot, drawing his likeness most probably from black and white movie stills, which were easily gotten even in those bygone days. It seems like there was early recognition of a fan market for stills of various movie stars, and I think the movie studios were happy to release such stills as it was a form of publicity.

Then again, around this time Eastern Color also released a Buster Crabbe licensed comic book, and some covers were drawn by Frazetta, Al Williamson, and George Evans. It seems likely that the artists might have had access to stills provided by Crabbe's agent, although whether they ever met with Crabbe in person would be a matter of speculation. Here's a particularly nice rendition of Frazetta's from the cover of BUSTER CRABBE #5:

https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=69606

Al Williamson's illustration of Crabbe in the first story in that issue, "Buster Crabbe and the Maid of Mars" strikes me as particularly dead-on, although of course the accuracy of the likeness does vary from panel to panel.

Buster Crabbe had the Ideal male form by the standards of his day. Betty Page had the ideal female form of that day.  I think the term often used in literature was "Clean Limbed". Their were many who might have been technically superior in form, but the public had seen and liked both for many years.
Also as pointed out there were oodles of still photos and screen grabs for artists to use.

[positronic1]

Also as pointed out there were oodles of still photos and screen grabs for artists to use.

Well, no 'screen grabs', and no way to pause the moving pictures on your television screen, but perhaps some particularly talented artists were capable of drawing a likeness while watching TV. There were posed still photos used specifically for publicity purposes, plus things like lobby cards which used enlargements of individual film frames. And of course individual actors would have their own portfolio of 'head shots' and the like, a useful thing to have when auditioning for a role.

Looking again at that page of Crabbe performing artificial respiration, I notice that the upper left corner has the same inset picture of Crabbe (wearing a cowboy hat) used on the cover of his own comic book, so the piece must have been contemporary with the publication of that title. A combination of PSA plus an ad for another Eastern Color comic book.

I am also reminded that Crabbe, like Weismuller before him, was an Olympic swimmer, and it's entirely possible that he may have done a promotional film for the Red Cross demonstrating these exact methods. If so, then Frazetta could simply have drawn Crabbe's likeness exactly from stills from the film.

[Captain Audio]

I had almost forgotten that motion picture scenes were often planned and composed by means of "Story Board" illustrations that were very similar to the panels of comic books.

Interesting site
http://bronzeageofblogs.blogspot.com/2016/11/al-williamsons-savage-world.html