Why? 'Cause fishin's fun!
This is something I really love about old Boys' Life magazines: these comics section features, drawn by the masterful artists at the Johnstone and Cushing agency, which usually appeared in the form of comic strips...
... but occasionally were presented in an attractive and highly informative 'info-graphic' manner.
These features made learning fun. Textbook publishers could have learned a lot about how to get kids to read educational material from the editors of Boys Life.
The artwork from that comics section feature looks like it might have been drawn by one of our previous subjects ( and now a TI list member ) Tom Sawyer (then Scheuer), back when he was one of Johnstone and Cushing's star artists. Perhaps Tom will let us know if my guess is correct...
Here are a few more ads and some story art from those early issues of Boy's Life...
These strips are fun and serviceably drawn, if unspectacular. I don't have a whole lot to say about them.
But I did want to point out this great piece by an artist I'm largely unfamiliar with: Gilbert Darling.
Here one can easily see the influence Al Dorne had on Darling's style. We spend so much time looking at the work of 1950's artists influenced by Al Parker and some others who would be considered the innovators of the 50's. But Dorne's influence should not be underestimated.
Dorne's slightly cartoony style of exaggeration married to a solid underpinning of good drawing and strong composition inspired hundreds of illustrators, from Gilbert Darling to Jack Davis to Robert McCloskey and on and on.
* My Fishing Flickr set.
* Be sure to drop by Charlie Allen's Blog for the latest CAWS: a dozen examples of Charlie's spot illustrations.
*ALSO* Last week's series on Ray Prohaska has been collected into a stand-alone blog, which will be updated occasionally by either me or Ray's son, Tony. If you'd like another look at last week's posts presented as one cohesive article, go to The Art of Ray Prohaska (and you'll notice the link has been added to my 'Classic Illustration Links" in the sidebar).
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