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Showing posts with label Al Hubbard. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Al Hubbard. Show all posts

Monday, June 13, 2011

Giant Red Ants

Even though this is a site dedicated to Walt Kelly, it still seems to make sense to show the Al Hubbard story art for The Adventures of Peter Wheat, since it's a continuation of Kelly's creation. Here we have issue #54, as always thanks to OtherEric of the Digital Comic Museum and his dedication to track down every possible issue of these rare comics to share with the world.

An introduction from OtherEric:

Here's a Connell/Hubbard issue of Adventures of Peter Wheat, #54 from 1955. While this team created fewer issues than Kelly, they actually worked on the book quite a bit longer than Kelly did—it just came out less frequently and on an irregular schedule that I still haven't quite figured out yet. The situation is not helped by the fact that the information line with the issue number and year is frequently blurry or unclear. I've hit several issues that were incorrectly labeled by the sellers and have at least one or two where I'm still only 90% sure I've correctly identified the issue even when it's in my hands.

This is a fairly typical issue by the team, and with one exception Thom and I will get to soon, it seems like they never did continued storylines. One thing I do like is that they only rarely use the Wizard and the Hornet Knights as the enemy—creating an interesting variety of new foes and challenges for Peter & crew to face. Kelly got away with using Dragonel and the Wizard as much as he did because he was constantly letting all the characters, heroes and villains alike, evolve and change. Connell & Hubbard seem to not have had that freedom, and take the series in a slightly different direction. This does allow them to occasionally pull out the Wizard to good effect when he does show up.

















Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Power Cookies

I debated with myself whether to post the below Peter Wheat News material here on Whirled of Kelly or over on the Pictorial Arts blog, just because none of this art or writing is by Walt Kelly at all. But it's a quality continuation of his earlier creation, and this viewership already has a familiarity with the series, so, here it is.

The comic book art is by Al Hubbard, a good choice for emulating Kelly's style. You may recognize his style a bit from the Mary Jane and Sniffles series in the Warner Bros franchise of comics. For completist's sake, I've included the covers, front and back, though they truly stray from Kelly.

As always, this material is brought to us with generosity by OtherEric of the Digital Comic Museum. And in fact, here are some words of introduction by him:

Here are two more issues of Peter Wheat News, this time not by Kelly, but by his replacement team of Del Connell and Al Hubbard. As a bonus, these happen to be consecutive issues, 43 and 44, so we can see how the three-parters in News tied together, as well as a look at how the books looked once Kelly left. While the new creators obviously don't live up to the standard that Kelly set, I don't think anybody really could. They do better than most people would, I think — the series remains charming and entertaining, and far better than the average 50s comic book fare. The #43 has been shared as a CBZ before this, but the #44 is new.

I wanted to give a little background on Connell and Hubbard, but ran into difficulty. Connell may have written some of the late Kelly issues of Peter Wheat, and I believe he was on staff at Western. Other than that I really don't know anything about him or his work. Hubbard, on the other hand, I could write about for pages. 99% of what I would write would just be variations of "I love Hubbard's work on Mary Jane & Sniffles", without much real content beyond that. Maybe some other time—it really is one of my favorite series and in my opinion better than any other comics based on the Warner Brothers cartoons by orders of magnitude.

Peter Wheat News #43:






Peter Wheat News #44:






Below, as another bonus, OtherEric has included this full-page back cover to FourColor #474, showcasing Al Hubbard's work on Mary Jane & Sniffles, and REALLY demonstrating the influence that Walt Kelly had on his work, in the composition, characterizations and artistic rendering.