I picked up some old newspapers recently, including a couple of copies of the
Evening News, the London evening daily which featured Paul Temple amongst others. I'll come to Paul at some point, but I thought I'd post examples of a few other strips that appeared.
The first is 'Little Panda', created by the famous Dutch artist Marten Toonder. It ran from 1946 until 1991 in several Dutch newspapers and was written and drawn by members of Toonder's studio, which included the British artist Harry Hargreaves. An obituary claims that Hargreaves was the artist of the strips that were reprinted in the
Evening News but I'm not convinced that is the case as it would depend on when the strip began appearing in the UK and whether it began by reprinting older stories. Hargreaves didn't join the studio until 1953. This example is from June 1953.
Next up, an episode of Matt Marriott by Tony Weare from September 1956. We have attempted to cover this series back in 2006 so I can do no better than to
direct you to that post.
The third and final strip is the classic Moomin strip by Tove Jansson. What surprised me, when I went to research this little note (i.e. looked her up on
Wikipedia) was that the stories were original to the
Evening News, for which Jansson wrote and drew 21 serials between 1954 and 1959. Some of the stories were co-written with her brother, Lars Jansson, who took over the artwork on the strip, which continued until 1975. Eight volumes of comic strip reprints have been published by Drawn & Quarterly (more details about the original serial titles and which strips have been reprinted
can be found here)
Those D&Q Moomin reprints are really wonderful, they have a line of colour editions too now.
ReplyDeleteI've heard a bit about Tony Weare & Matt Marriott through things like Paul Duncan's ARK and his guest art spot on V For Vendetta. Shame there doesn't seem to be a book collecting some of his work.