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Wednesday, May 28, 2008


Number 316


Love-sick!



Speaking of love--without the sick--I really love Jack Bradbury's comic art from the late 1940s and early '50. The work he did later for Disney comics I find less interesting, but he was working in a stricter panel format on characters well established by other artists. Bradbury created Spunky and Stanley, published in Spunky Junior Cowboy, and it is Bradbury's genius that makes the strip so good.

Every panel with Stanley, the love-sick horse, is funny. Spunky's horse belongs to an animation tradition, and I'm thinking of Ichabod Crane's horse in Disney's The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow. Bradbury had a true gift for comic exaggeration and every time I look at his work I admire it more.









4 comments:

Mr. Karswell said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Mr. Karswell said...

Bradbury is another guy I want to start collecting eventually, fun fun fun! Such strong sense of design, you look at his lay-outs and line work and know you're witness to a truly talented illustrator.

Chuck Wells said...

Yeah, I agree with you guys on Jack Bradbury. He has the chops all right!

As much as I like action-suspense-heroic and other adventure-style comics, I really do love this typf of humor work.

Pappy said...

Chuck, I could never tie myself to one kind of comic book. I liked them all, which is one of my failings as a collector. I wanted everything, but could only manage to get small portions of a lot of different things. I really love the funny and screwball stuff, which is why it ends up on this blog. It's been largely forgotten by an increasingly narrow modern comics audience. Any time I can turn somebody on to a great artist not widely known in this era I'm a happy Pappy!