The Jack Bradbury Index (Comic Art of Jack Bradbury), confirms that Beany and Cecil creator, Bob Clampett, specifically requested that Jack Bradbury do the art for a series of Dell B&C comics in the early 1950s (thanks, Joel!). Bradbury, of course, responded with the master's touch.
The same Bradbury index reports Clampett wrote this story, but the Grand Comic Book Database (GCD) gives the nod to Don R. Christensen. Either way, the story moves along smooth as silk with brilliant wordplay reading like a child's book of rhymes. This is from Four Color No. 477, June 1953.
I alway's dug the way that, even in cartoon form, Cecil is drawn as a puppet.
ReplyDeleteSo surreal.
Jeff: I know. He has buttons for nostrils and black flannel for eyelashes. He is a sock puppet, complete with sagging cloth at his neck. Heck, his mouth even ripples up when under stress, showing the hand bunching up in a sock.
ReplyDeleteI love trying to imagine his method for locomotion. A thrusting along on fins? A snake's wiggle? You never see his lower extremeties, but in the cartoons he moved through water like a giant, swift boat being oared with tremendous force. "I'm coming, Beany boy!"
This is a real, honest to goodness adventure! I love that they didn't do a bunch of short 4-pagers. the cover is nice too!
ReplyDeleteKW: I love that painted cover! I'm not sure who did it, though. I thought the writing was pretty cool, too.
ReplyDeleteThis is one of those popular series that never really made it into my hands.
ReplyDeleteGetting to see stuff like this now, makes me truly regret that.
Chuck: I have found the world of Kids' Comics a bit like that old formula expressing wisdom. To paraprase: the more I learn, the more I realize the bottomless depths of my ignorance.
ReplyDeleteI was amused to see the comments about how much the Cecil character looks like a puppet! In fact, my father had one of the actual Cecil puppets (from the original tv show), provided by Clampett for use as a model when he was drawing the comic books. (It was pretty fun to have it around the house when we kids were growing up!) So it's not surprising that the comic version reflects the puppet so much.
ReplyDeleteAs for the story origin--I had just assumed it came out of Clampett's operation, but it is certainly possible that the stories were also farmed out to Dell, and Don Christensen certainly did a lot of stories for Dell, so the Grand Comic Book Database may certainly be right about this.
Joel Bradbury
Joel: Thanks for your help in confirming your father as the artist, and thanks for commenting. I have been a fan of your father's work for a long time and consider him one of the greatest comic book artists that ever lived. -- Mykal
ReplyDeleteSo nice to see this again...I remember owning it when I was a kid, but didn't know until seeing it here that it was drawn by Jack Bradbury. Maybe my love for Bradbury's cartooning goes back to my original fondness for this when I was in first grade.
ReplyDeletePap: I love Bradbury, too, and am very glad you enjoyed it. I love that Clampett specified Bradbury. That says so much. Whenever I look at Bradbury's work from the 1940s and early 1950s (Giggle, Ha-Ha, etc), I always feel myself saying, "that's what it's supposed to look like."
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