Sunday Heritage Day.

As I said last week, for the forseeable future you are only going to see strips here, I have already posted about. Nwe scans, but in additaion to what I already have. Which means someday I will have to go and put them all in the right order. Long Sam is one of those strips I would love to see reprpinted and if it was possible, I would show tham all so you can read the storylines without interuption. Today I have a substantial run from 1955 and 1956, some of which will fit together with some of the others if you follow the link. Or you can just enjoy Bob Lubbers' pretty pictures.

Saturday Leftover Day.

This week we learned that Bob Lubbers, one of the most extraordinairy artists that ever lived, has passed away. Lubbers worked in comics and newspaper strip and excelled in both. I have show much of his work, bt my favorite is his ten year run on the Al Capp signed (though actually his brother Eliott wrote them) Long Sam. I am surprised to see that I haven't shown any Long Sam for three years. But that probably is because I am collecting more, so that one day I can show longer runds that you can actually read instead of just look at the pretty pictures. For this week though, looking at the pretty pictures is enough. Here are a couple of early Long Sam's from 1954.

Saturday Leftover Day.

After showing the first few weeks of Long Sam (which appeared to have been drawn by Frank Frazetta and inked by the later solo artist Bob Lubbers) I have stepped up my efforts to get some more of this gorgous strip. In the end I hope to be able to show longer runs of this almost ten year running strip, but until now my collection (large as it is) is spotty. So here are some early ones to feast your eye on.

Thursday Story Strip Day.

Three really early samples of Long Sam that recently came into my possession. Man, what I wouldn't give for Tery and the Pirates type reprint. If you want to see more, you can also go to the ilovecomix site (where I took the second one in this post), where the good people have gathered long runs of many strips from all sorts of different sources (including my blog). I trust these will end up there as well.

Calling All Fans

Thursday Comic Strip Day.

I ran into a great run of Sundays of Neal Adam's soap opera tour de force Ben Casey. Older collectors like me, have the complete daily run from the great Menommenee Fals Gazette reprint paper. The Sundays of this strip told a seperate story and are never reprinted, not even in magazine form. One of the reasons may be that thye o not do very well in black and white (except if you have one of th many orginals floating around), because it was colored as richly as it was drawn. The run I have here can get quite muddy sometimes. What makes it to good, is the fact that it is a run (and I can get more, up till the end of the strip in mid 1966) that consists completely of the three tier version. and it's complete, so for the first time in a long time you can actually read the stories.

After clipping a long run of Chris Welkin, Planeteer and iscovering that it was represented in full on www.ilovecomixarchive.com I went to have a look at what they had from Ben Casey. And indeed they did have all the dailies, but only a smattering of Sundays and many two tiers as well. I have represented a couple here, so you can see how much less impressive these two tier versions are. I don't think that was the case with all strip, but sadly many of them suffored that way. Also included here are a couple of tabloid versions of Ben Casey Sundays from Ilovecomix (which I highly recommend if you want to see more), which had one less panel than the three tier, in a unique cutting version I have never seen before. See if you can spot it. So who's doing the 92 page color book and what's the delay?