Sponsored Comics: Will Wynn

I guess maybe Bill Lignante was a pretty serious baseball fan after all. He, along with George Olesen, took over Ozark Ike in 1954 when the master, Ray Gotto, left seeking greener pastures. I always thought that the work of the clean-up crew of Lignante and Olesen was rather perfunctory on that formerly great strip. But when Lignante developed a feature for Family Comics what did he come up with but another baseball yarn, this one titled Will Wynn. I take that to mean that Lignante really loved the game. Or, in the spirit of glass half empty, does it mean that Lignante just used it as a way to recycle old art and plots from Ozark Ike?

This strip was the front page for the Family Comics section, so Maurer or whoever published it must have thought it would hook the kids. Since the section ran in early summer, and kids actually cared about baseball back in those good old days, perhaps he was right.