Pappy's Golden Age Comics Blogzine

Number 815

Maureen Marine

I believe Harold Delay (sometimes spelled DeLay) is the artist for this strip from the short-lived Blue Circle Comics. It's a well-drawn but silly feature from Blue Circle Comics #1. Unlike the Land Of The Lost story I showed you in Pappy's #706, this soggy saga is told straight-faced, without the whimsy of the EC children's comic.

Blue Circle Comics was one of a series of titles put out by Rural Home Publishing, who also did Blazing Comics.

Harold Delay was an old-time illustrator, working on book illustrations at the turn of the 20th Century, drawing for pulps in the twenties and thirties, then into comics for a time in the forties. I can't find any birth or death information on Delay, so if you know please tell me. He was one of a group of artists* who were working long before comic books existed, and whose drawing still reflected an earlier era. Maureen, for instance, looks like a girl out of a storybook from the pre-World War I era. In 1941 and '42 Delay did outstanding adaptations of Gulliver's Travels and Treasure Island in Target Comics, which fit his style well.

*Besides Delay I can think of H. (Henry) C. Keifer (who also had a strip in Blue Circle Comics #1), Alex Blum (sometimes under the name Alex Boon), H. (Harry) G. Peter, longtime Wonder Woman artist, and George Carlson (Jingle Jangle Comics).