Sunday morning and back again for more 4 color fun delivered to your doorstep for pennies a serving. Another glimpse back to the days before newspapers wanted to charge you a dollar for page after page of advertisements and actually offered content between said ads. SOME even had news!
Part 2 of my scans of the March 12, 1960 edition of the "Star". I'm sure I knew what city the "Star" was in when I bought it, but this info is lost to the passing sands of time I suppose.
Today we see Milton Caniff's mature soap opera "Steve Cayon". So far from his adventuresome "Dickie Dare" or "Terry & The Pirates" days, yet changing for all the right reasons. Deft inking and layouts and adult characterization and good solid storytelling.
Harry Weinert's "Vignettes of Life" another of the hodge-podge/anthology strips of the day. Easy to read, easy for the editor to lop off 1/2 of and run ads or another feature instead. More commerce in action...it is what it is.
Lee Falk's "Mandrake the Magician". Past it's prime here for sure, but 1960 still doesn't seem out of time for MM as 1968 will.
Full bore centerspread with three (count 'em 3!) strips to a double size page. Far better than the last time I looked at a paper and saw as many as 6 on a regular page.
Mell Lazarus' "Miss Peach", "Ripley's 'Belieeve It or Not'" and Jimmy Hatlo's "They'll Do It Every Time". The strip page was evolving as tastes were and rightfully so. These strips are breezy, easy to read and easy of the eye.
Nothing wrong with any of that, I learn more and more as I mature as well.
Talk to you soon.
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2 comments:
The paper that ran the comics section you're posting is the Toronto Star (in Canada, of course). That paper was, and still is, Toronto's leading daily, and like all Canadian papers, their comics were included in the Saturday paper, as there is no Sunday edition.
But in the rest of Canada, all of their weekend features — comics, magazine, a small-type section with an original novella, and a few other things — were published on the Monday before the Saturday which date they carried. That bunch of sections were called The Star Weekly, and for many decades it was a Canadian institution.
I was a Star Weekly carrier during the period in which your section was published. Therefore, I delivered the very section — well, a copy of it — that you are now posting. When I received my weekly pile of papers, I first of all sat down and pored over the coloured comics. I was always delighted to get them five days early. Overjoyed, actually.
The Star Weekly is long gone now, but there are still traces. A "corner store" just down the street from my home now (in Vancouver) still sports a large neon sign in the shape of a star, with STAR WEEKLY in big letters, and the name of the store in small letters. It was a freebie for the store, I assume. Those signs used to be everywhere.
The Star Weekly "funnies" had one negative feature. For some reason, they used a slightly shorter page size than normal. If you look at the comics, almost all of them have been trimmed across the bottom of each tier, cutting off the bottom of the frames. They always did that, and it drove me nuts. I usually did not do my strip-collecting (yes, even then) using their pages, but sourced them elsewhere. I have my standards!
So now you know.
Wow! A great and informed comment. Thanks for dropping by Katherine, I hope to hear from you again.
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