Number 312

Babe and the triple-lunged twins

I think you'd have to look pretty hard to find a more oddball comic book than Boody Rogers' Babe.

A couple of months ago I bought a copy of Babe #10, Feb.-Mar. 1950, along with coverless copies of the first two issues of Rogers' Dudley. Dudley is an Archie-styled comic book, and Babe is a version of Li'l Abner. Boody puts Babe in Abner-type situations, but his plots seem slightly more whacko than Al Capp's, if that's possible. See if you agree when you meet the triple-lunged twins.

Page 1 / Page 2 / Page 3 / Page 4 / Page 5 / Page 6 / Page 7 / Page 8 / Page 9 / Page 10 / Page 11 / Page 12

******

In the Henry Boltinoff posting a couple of weeks ago I mentioned that a few years ago I bought three originals from him. One of the comments to the post mentioned that it would be nice to see them, so here they are. I have a correction…I was wrong when I said one was a Cap's Hobby page; it's actually a Little Pete page, which looks to be an ad for a company called Emenee, if I'm reading it correctly. This may be the first appearance of the other pages, which I don't believe have ever been published. According to indications on the pages they were written off by DC in the early '80s. The pages were too big to scan, so I did them in two halves and friend David Miller stitched them together. Thanks, Dave!

More about →

Number 308

The Filler Brush Man

I wonder if anyone has ever counted how many individual DC Comics cartoonist Henry Boltinoff appeared in. When I was a kid in the 1950s reading DC he was in every single issue I read. For years he was the filler artist for DC. Boltinoff, who died in 2001, sold me some of his original art years ago. There was an ad in Comics Buyers' Guide from Mr. Boltinoff, three pages for $25! A real bargain. He sent me a couple of full-pagers, and a "Cap's Hobby Shop" entry, all from 1960s comics.

Studying Henry's original artwork showed me he was a meticulous craftsman. Nearly every neatly brushed line is worked over in white paint to make sure it looked as smooth as possible. He probably didn't need to spend that much time on it, but he did. He was a true professional in every sense.

If there's anything else I can say about these examples from my 1940s Batman issues, it's that the gags themselves aren't laugh-out-loud funny, but more like mildly amusing. His work is very appealing, though, and someone thought it was funny because he made many sales of single panel cartoons to prestige publications like Saturday Evening Post. He also did syndicated panels in newspapers for years.

The example on the top of this page is from Batman #37.

Batman #53:

Batman #54:

Batman #55:

Batman #56:


Batman #57:


Batman #58:

More about →