Slylock Fox Bumped for The Pig Family on Vacation
Bumping Slylock Fox from his own strip last week Friday was The Pig Family (unofficial attribute by commenters). It was a nice change and when they reappeared this past Wednesday it got my hopes up that a recurring guest spot would become a regular feature this Summer. I fondly recall Bob’s gags for Bonnie and Boo Boo and Oh, Brother!
And Bob, don’t think I missed that tribute to dad
Nom Nom Nearness
Wednesday, just inches from each other, Reality Check and Ripley’s Believe It or Not had the same sound effects.
Juliet and Leroy
The Vintage Heart of Juliet Jones reminds me to link to this recent Todd Klein essay on the Leroy Lettering device that gained some popularity with American comic books (famously EC) and a few comic strips.
Mark and Cherry au naturel
I enjoyed Mark Trail and Cherry hiking through the Lost Forest this entire week’s worth of strips (starts here). Scenery and the trademark animals showing up in every strip. The only thing that would have made it better was if one of those speech balloon arrows had been pointed to an animal.
Half Full Half Syndicated
Half Full continues to appear thrice weekly on GoComics and on their digital platform for newspaper websites. But it has been dropped from Andrews McMeel Syndicate’s list for print distribution. So any who were wondering if the panel would continue as half rerun half new in the daily fishwrap … that’s a no.
No, No, No, No
Really disappointed Hi and Lois haven’t taught Chip how to handle records.
Getting the no’s out of my system
With no gutters to speak of I would have liked to see Dana run the copyright and distributor’s slug horizontally along the bottom of today’s Phoebe and Her Unicorn. It messes with the “negative space” as it is.
Re: the JULIET JONES from 1966 with the Leroy lettering: I imagine this was an emergency solution used by Drake to replace the ultra-durable skills of Ben Oda, whose beautiful work appears (oddly enough) in a Sunday on Mike’s post today. Inasmuch as the 1973-76 run we carried when the Menomonee Falls Gazette existed was still by Oda seven years later, I doubt this was more than that. (In fact, he was still lettering JONES, RIP KIRBY, ON STAGE, APT. 3-G, FLASH GORDON and several others at that time while also lettering full time for DC Comics. It makes today’s mechanical replacement by computer lettering virtually everywhere all the sadder, as we’ll never see the true art in the profession ever again. In fact, as I see the exact same lettering faces designed by someone else being used by multiple “letterers” in current comic books, it’s evidently now defined as the “art of balloon placement on a digital page” rather than the actual physical act of using a Speedball, a bottle of Pelikan or Higgins and a lettering guide on Strathmore in an art contribution as real and impactful as the cartooning it’s complementing. Or am I just being an old fart again?
A quick check shows that Ben Oda(?) returns to the dailies on July 4, 1966 (July 31 for the Sundays).
As The Daily Cartoonist noted the machine lettering began in January of 1966 for the dailies:
https://www.dailycartoonist.com/index.php/2022/12/23/christmas-week-funnies-without-christmas/