The art was by former animator, Owen Fitzgerald, and the scripts for the early issues were done by Cal Howard, a moonlighting comedy writer who later went on to writing for The Today Show. This issue, #9 (1951), is a good example of Hope’s style of comedy, mixed in with a Charles Addams style script. (It isn’t the only one of its type I have shown. I featured another issue in 2011. Go to the link below.) Hope died just a couple of months past his 100th birthday, with his career spanning about 80 of those 100 years.
DC went after popular comedians for licensing purposes in the fifties: Hope, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis (Jerry Lewis solo when the team split up), and Jackie Gleason. They also licensed movie stars like Alan Ladd, and Roy Rogers’ distaff side, Dale Evans. Nowadays DC has moved to Burbank, California, because their characters are the ones licensed for movies. It’s interesting how that worked out.
This is the whole issue, all 52 pages, including the back up strip, “Miss Beverly Hills of Hollywood,” drawn by Bob Oksner, who would later take on the art chores for the comic book versions of Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis.
An earlier posting from Adventures of Bob Hope by the team of Howard and Fitzgerald. Just click on the thumbnail.
