Saturday, October 29, 2005
Ad Strips : Mrs. Van Thick
Here's a head-scratcher of an ad strip. These were run by Graybar Electric, a manufacturer of electrical components (like fuseboxes, outlets, etc) in 1926. If you read these you'll find that they really make no particular reference to the company's products. I guess this was the ol' soft-sell?
Anyway, reason I show these is because they're credited to one 'Dick Spencer', but I'd say they're actually by Jack Patton, who is most famous for his Texas History Movies strip. It was pretty much par for the course in those days to credit ad strips to fake generic names like that, and part of the fun of them is trying to figure out the identity of the cartoonist.
EDIT: Pablo Medrano Bigas writes to tell me that Dick Spencer really did exist, or at least is most likely not a pseudonym for Jack Patton. He sent me some other advertising art also signed by this Spencer chap. Thanks for setting me straight Pablo!
