Bill Peckmann &Books &Comic Art &Independent Animation 01 Mar 2012 07:00 am
Walt Kelly’s Our Gang
Today and tomorrow we’ll focus on some of the early and brilliant art of Walt Kelly.
- Bill Peckmann has forwarded some of the covers from Walt Kelly‘s Dell comic books, the “Our Gang” series, dated 1946 & 1947. Also included in this stash are a couple of the interior stories.
Bill writes:
- I certainly wish I had more than these 7 issues of Walt Kelly’s “Our Gang” comic books published by Dell, but looking at these covers, they will give you a sense of what Kelly was up to.
- Each issue contained a 14 to 16 page “Our Gang” story done by Kelly, a “Tom and Jerry” story, a “Flip and Dip”, a Carl Barks “Barney Bear and Benny Burro” piece and ended with an appearance by “Wuff the Prairie Dog”.
- I’ll include one “Our Gang” story and one “Barney Bear” to round out the post and save the “Pogo” comics for a post by themselves.
1August 1946
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September 1946
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December 1946
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January 1947
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February 1947
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June 1947
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back cover
All the back covers have basically the same subscription ad,
but I thought I’d send one along for the “currency” shock of it.
What happens when you pour deceptively simple and totally charming into a bottle and shake ‘em up? Why out pours Walt Kelly’s “Our Gang” comics of course! What a touch he had for combining “cartoony” and “straight” in those stories, not an easy thing to pull off, he and Roy Crane were masters of it! Norman Maurer of “Boy” and “Daredevil” comics also had that wonderful ability.
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Here are two Walt Kelly single page gags from the same issue.
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on 01 Mar 2012 at 1:35 pm 1.Stephen Worth said …
Egad! I’m glad he stuck to animals in later years. That Our Gang comic is hard to look at!
on 01 Mar 2012 at 1:48 pm 2.Bill said …
Beauty is in the eye, ear, nose and throat of the beholder!
on 01 Mar 2012 at 1:57 pm 3.Stephen Worth said …
My favorite are the two putty faces at the bottom of page 7. It looks like he’s trying to draw as bad as he can to see if he can get it by the editor. He did!
on 01 Mar 2012 at 2:58 pm 4.The Gee said …
Was he inking his own work? During that period was he cranking out a lot, like more than one comic a month?
I’ll cut him slack on how he drew people in those pages just because he also included picket fences, goats and steamboats. How often do you see that combination these days?
on 01 Mar 2012 at 9:16 pm 5.Lewis Achenbach said …
Great post
on 02 Mar 2012 at 4:32 pm 6.Mark Sonntag said …
Deadlines would have been pretty tight with both he and Barks doing multiple comics at a time. That said, although not his greatest work, this stuff is infinitely better than a large proportion of comics today.