Number 988


The Ditsy Chicks


Owen Fitzgerald was an animator, first with Disney, then Fleischer Brothers, then went into comic book work with the Sangor (ACG) shop. At some point he went to DC and did Adventures Of Bob Hope comics (a very well done comic book, by the way, in both writing and art), then at another point replaced Al Wiseman as the artist on the Dennis the Menace comic books. Fitzgerald died in 1994.

Bob Wick (Wickersham) was also an animator/comic book artist, and did excellent work for ACG, including the wonderful Kilroys comic book. These two stories, Moronica by Fitzgerald and Our Kid Sister by "Bob Wick", appeared in The Kilroys #28, from 1951. As a character Moronica is more from the My Friend Irma mold, and sixty years later, dumb blonde jokes are still funny. As for Sis, she's a normal teenager, easily distracted in her own little world.

Something I really like about Fitzgerald's artwork is economy of line. He doesn't have any more lines in his drawings than what needs to be shown. His inking is beautiful. He made it look easy, which as we all know, means it isn't easy at all.

Wickersham's Kid Sister is in motion all the time; I love the sequence in the chair while she talks on the phone. I also like that she wants to save her comic books when she thinks the house is on fire. Personally, I would have gone for the comics first, records second (records being more easily replaced than comic books), but everyone has their priorities. She'd even try to save her pictures of Van Johnson. Like I said, ditsy.

Number 694

The new TV

This funny story from The Kilroys #13 reminds me of the first TV set my dad and mom bought in 1950. As the character, Natch, says to his dad, "They don't cost so much. Only about four or five hundred." I'm not sure how much that would be in 2010 dollars, but probably a few thousand at least. Some people were willing to pay exorbitantly to get in on the new technology. In other words, things haven't changed a bit! You iPad buyers know that.

Like most new technology, the curious stood back and watched as people who had to have it bought a television. Just as in the story they'd invite themselves over to watch. My dad and mom, who nobody ever just dropped in on, solved the problem. Dad put up the aerial in the attic. We got great reception, but no one in the neighborhood knew we had a set.

I'll be getting into The Kilroys more in the future. I think it was a great comic, well illustrated by Bob Wickersham, and script credit given at times for Hubie Karp. There aren't any credits on this 1948 story, but whoever wrote it was in touch with the social phenom of the postwar era, the neighborhood television

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Here's where artists get their inspiration (swipes). Al Hartley did these "Kollege Kapers" from this issue of The Kilroys in 1948. The Barbasol ad had appeared in Life magazine a year earlier.