Saturday Mexican Day. I cleaned up a few more Gordo Sundays. I have shown some earlier and they are among my most copied scans. And actually, they are the reason that I have started adding a light copyright line to my scans. Oddly, book containing Gordo are not selling well. Maybe because they have not been in color? Or maybe Gordo works best as a one off illustration? I just like them regardless.

 

Saturday Leftover Day.

So how about a little early Gordo for the weekend? Gordo started in 1941 but was dialed down to a Sunday only strip wheile Gus Arriola was in the army. After the war, the Sunday strip slowly went from storyline based to gag based. In this early run from 1946, you'll see a lot of Arriolas later tropes being introduced. You can also see, how he let his love of jazz influence the subject, content and writing style.

I have shown many of the later Sundays here. Most of which were distributed over the intrenet, up to the point where they were used for both Gus Arriola and Gordos Wikipedia page. When a favorite image turned up on the Fantagraphics page introducing the candidates for the 2018 Eisner Lifetime Achievement Awards, I started adding a line about the fact these scans were don eby me. I used a lighter color, so it doesn't intrude on the total image too much. Since then I have found some of my scans with the line cut off, though. So maybe it doesn't help.

Friday Comic Book Day.

While looking through issues of TipTop to find Nancy reprints to use, I came across a very short run of early Godo's reprinted in that same comic book. Here are the pages from the two I could find.

Tuesday Comic Strip Day.

Over the Christmas days I prepared a couple of posts with some of my more deluxe material. Here is what I had left of fan favorite strip Gordo. Gordo had two starts. It started in the early forties as a daily strip. A couple of years after that a Sunday was added, but when the artist Gus Arriola was called into active duty in the army, the daily was dropped. The Sunday continued until 1948, when it was resumed. These strips cover those first and less rarely seen early years. It is interesting to see that, although it was a bit different in the beginnen, and far less stylized than it would become in the fifties, Arriola's unique sense of design is already visible here.