Wednesday, 14 June 2017

Jinks in the Comics

It isn’t often you see Mr. Jinks interact with humans in animated cartoons—a couple with a butler, one with a warehouse manager, and one with an off-screen female owner come to mind—but comic books and strips went off in their own direction.

Here are Mr. Jinks and the miserable meeces—and Professor McHerring—in a Dell Comic with a cover date of May-July 1962. Jinksy is drawn very attractively here.



Here’s a pantomime single-pager from the same issue. This must be a different artist; Jinks is much more angular here (and why is he the wrong colour?). The meeces have huge pupils in this comic. The backgrounds are pretty sparse.



Click on any of the pages to make them bigger.
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8 comments:

  1. Mike Tiefenbacher14 June 2017 at 08:27

    The story and the one-pager may both be the work of Harvey Eisenberg (the story definitely is), with each being inked by a different artist. Eisenberg was much in demand, and though he could have provided his own inking, the folks at Western Publishing (who packaged all the comics published by Dell during this period) preferred that he pencil only so he could turn out more work every month. The surface details, of course, are affected every bit as much by the inker as the penciler, and are likely what you're seeing as the differences between them. (I don't feel confident enough of my ability to identify the inkers correctly, so I'll leave that to others.) Note on the coloring of the story: though the inker provided the color hold lines, the colorist ignored the fact that Jinks should properly have hands and feet colored the same color as his muzzle. It may have been sloppiness, or it may have been a minor means to cut color-separating costs. The colorist who did the one-pager was evidently another person (and unconcerned with cost), though he or she also got it wrong as they weren't meant to be white either.

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    1. rodineisilveira14 June 2017 at 16:29

      I also recognize the Harvey Eisenberg's (the "Carl Barks from Hanna-Barbera") artwork on these materials.

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  2. Mike T.14 June 2017 at 08:28

    Hmm ... The professor wants talking fish and has various other animals that do human-like things, but a cat and mice that talk don't interest him.

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    1. Llera14 June 2017 at 11:32

      Comics have a logic all their own! Real-life rules apply only as they fit the story! Every kid who read comics in the 50s and 60s knew that!

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    2. stinky fitzwizzle14 June 2017 at 14:54

      Ha ha!

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    3. Yowp15 June 2017 at 19:22

      One of the best comments here, ever.

      Delete
  3. Mark Kausler14 June 2017 at 15:29

    That's Harvey Eisenberg's lettering on the story title: "Something Fishy", but he didn't do the balloon lettering within the story pages.

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  4. Unknown17 June 2017 at 07:01

    Youwp....seems like you're the only link I found to this, so I have the original drawing for the yogi bear fathers day comic strip drawing from 6/17/1962. Do you know what this would be worth?

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