Monday, May 27, 2013

 

The Chicago Tribune Comic Book: Fighting with Daniel Boone



A quasi-historical imagining of Daniel Boone's adventures in founding the town of Boonesboro/Boonesborogh/Fort Boone, this feature was by C.C. (Carlisle) Cooper. Although the strip is quite good and consistently entertaining, it suffers from excellent but cartoony art that just isn't appropriate for a blood-and-thunder adventure strip like this.  There's also the matter of the name, which it seems to me implies that the strip is actually told from the viewpoint of Boone's adversaries. Although that concept might have some merit for being out of the ordinary, in fact the badly worded name was meant to indicate that the strip was about those who fought alongside Boone.

In the early strips, Boone's partners are a couple of hunters cum sidekicks named Bear-Dog and Pierre Perue. Later, the focus shifts to Boone's young friend Catfish (seen in the samples above), who periodically elbows Boone out of his own strip. It's all good fun, with just enough historical accuracy to keep the historians from taking up arms against the cartoonist.

Fighting with Daniel Boone debuted on October 27 1940, and ran about a month past the end of the Comic Book itself, ending on May 9 1943. As far as I know, this is Cooper's only newspaper cartooning credit, and that's a shame as it seems to me he would have been really good handling the art on a humor strip.

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Comments:
Still alive as of a couple years ago,
when he listed his favorite comic strip as Fighting with Daniel Boone.
http://www.vcstar.com/news/2011/feb/25/personality-sketches/
D.D.Degg
 
Looks like the link to C. C. Cooper is now dead, probably needs to be linked to the Wayback Machine page.

D.D. was correct when he wrote it, but Cooper would pass away only a few months later on September 11, 2013.

my best
-Ray Bottorff Jr
 
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