Friday, April 07, 2006
Obscurity of the Day: Red Builder Tales
Not many people know it, but the socialist paper The Daily Worker went through quite a long period where they ran their own comic strips. The earnest folks at the paper were seriously humor impaired, but they gave it the ol' college try. Here's one of their earlier efforts, Red Builder Tales. The main purpose of this very short run strip is to recruit people to sell the paper.The strip ran every two to three days from June 19 to July 20 1934. The cartoonist, who was with the paper for many years and was their most consistent comic strip producer, signed himself only as 'del'. I believe his real name was Fred Ellis.
EDIT: Thanks to Steven Rowe, 'del' has been correctly reidentified as Maurice del Bourgo, a prolific comic book artist of the 40s. Here's a great sample of his editorial work showing that the signatures are identical. Thanks Steven!
Labels: Obscurities
