Dan Spiegle was born 100 years ago today (and passed on in 2017)
© William Boyd Ent.(?)
Dan Spiegle was born on December 12, 1920. He got his start on the Hopalong Cassidy comic strip. After that he went on to a very productive career as a comic book artist. An attempt at a sea-faring comic strip didn’t get picked up, but he did manage to return to comic strips as the last person to draw the syndicated Terry and the Pirates.
It is said Dan assisted Thomas Warkentin on the Star Trek comic strip in 1980, but I don’t see any strips that shout Spiegle. (My unsourced notes say he was on the strip between Mark Rice and Ron Harris putting him around July to August.)
© Paramount
© Tribune Content Agency
Here a good interview with Dan.
In 1951. [King Features] bought us out, and then they sent for me to come to New York to get acquainted and talk things over. It was here that I joined the National Cartoonists Society and got involved with the organization.
King decided to make “Hopalong” a promotional strip which means that they would put something like two unknown strips with “Hoppy,” and sell them as a package. They’d say, if you want “Hopalong Cassidy” you have to take the other ones, as well.
Twomorrows has published a magazine devoted to Dan’s career.
© Dan Spiegle
Added panels in reply to question below:
Any idea what’s blotted out in the last Hoppy strips?
I guess it would have to be “bags”. But why blotted out?
Didn’t find the printed version of that Sunday but the Tuesday following has “saddlebags” but the lettering of the ‘bags’ portion is a bit different and larger. Did they decide against “saddlesacks” or something other word?
(Couldn’t embed the image here so I put the Tuesday panel in the above post.)