Can you tell us what's weird about the first page of this tale of Roy Rogers' horse,Trigger?
Roy, though he appears in the story, isn't named!
Only referred to as "Trigger's owner" or, later, "Trigger's master"!
Writer Gaylord DuBois and artist Harry Parkhurst treated this never-reprinted short feature from Dell's Roy Rogers Comics #26 (1950) more like an illustrated prose story than a normal comic tale, heavy on narrative captions with minimal word balloons!
The bacteria Diphtheria is still a lethal threat to this day. but standardized vaccination keeps outbreaks at a minimum.
Besides a strip in Roy Rogers Comics, Trigger (like Gene Autry's Champion and the Lone Ranger's Silver) had his own comic, which ran 16 issues!
In his own title, Trigger was shown in his re-Roy Rogers days as a wild horse traveling with a herd, but the Roy Rogers Comics strip showed him in the care of "Uncle" Mike Hanford, who told stories of Roy and Trigger in the past tense.
Was Roy (the character, not the actual Western performer) retired or deceased at the time of the "Uncle Mike" atrips?
There's never a clear answer...
Please Support Western Comics Adventures
Visit Amazon and Order...
An original feature created by Gaylord Du Bois, CHUCKWAGON CHARLEY'S TALES ran the last four issues of ANIMAL COMICS (27-30), then migrated to ROY ROGERS COMICS #1, where it ran for 19 issues, before being suspended to make way for the TRIGGER strip.
ReplyDeleteThe premise was the same in both features, and Parkhurst was assigned to illustrate Du Bois's scripts for both.
Chuckwagon Charley would be be pestered by the twins, Pat and Pete, to tell them stories about one of the five animals who populated the strips episodes.
The dog sub-feature, Whirlwind the White Wolfhound and Tommy Frayne, was recycled by Du Bois when he wrote LASSIE #1: an orphan boy and an orphaned dog.
The framing device of an adult telling two kids, a boy and a girl, the story, was later recycled by Du Bois in his HI-YO SILVER series, in which Lone Ranger was the narrator.
When CHUCKWAGON CHARLEY'S TALES was suspended for the new TRIGGER feature, the twins, Pat and Pete, were moved off the trail setting they'd been part of with Pete (I suspect it was cowboys rounding up cattle; whereas the Lone Ranger was guiding a wagon train), and arrived at the ranch where Uncle Mike became the Chuckwagon Charley device, and the animal stories the kids pestered him to tell were always about Trigger with collateral characters for each episode.
So, the twins, Pat and Pete actually populated both strips.
Later, when TRIGGER became its own series, CHUCKWAGON CHARLEY'S TALES returned to ROY ROGERS COMICS with a new illustrator.
Harry Parkhurst was from the old school style of illustration, cf. Raeburn Van Buren (ABBY AN' SLATTS), Frank Godwin (RUSTY RILEY), Arthur Jameson (FAIRY TALE PARADE, ANIMAL COMICS, SANTA CLAUS FUNNIES, POPULAR COMICS, often illustrating Du Bois scripts such as THE RETURN OF ROBIN HOOD strip in POPULAR COMICS), and a latter-day practitioner of that traditional style, José Luis Salinas (CISCO KID).
Parkhurst had been a successful commercial artist of advertising illustration (e.g. Arrow shirts sorts of ads) in the slicks during the teens and twenties, but the Great Depression depressed that market, and he turned to painting covers for the pulps. The advertising market had competition from color photography after the war (though there were many great ads by great artists in the '40s, '50s, and '60s, it wasn't what it had been).
Of Parkhurst's post-war work, in his entire tenure at Western Printing (Dell Comics & K.K. Publications), he was always assigned as Du Bois's illustrator, but for two issues of ZANE GREY'S in FOUR COLOR.
Parkhurst's Du Bois work did include one of the ZANE GREY'S in the FOUR COLOR series, as well as one ROY ROGERS in MARCH OF COMICS, one ROY ROGERS COMICS in FOUR COLOR, the CHUCKWAGON CHARLEY'S TALES strip in ANIMAL COMICS and ROY ROGERS COMICS, the TRIGGER strip in ROY ROGERS COMICS, and the KIYOTEE KIDS strip in RED RYDER COMICS: all Du Bois scripts.