Saturday 15 September 2012

And the answer is...

... Alex Raymond!

 He, without a doubt, pencilled them and signed them. Who inked them is another question wich remains open to debate. The panels below are taken from the final two weeks of "Bleak Prospects" (May 31 to June 12, 1948), IDW Rip Kirby vol 1, pages 256 to 259.








See how different the inking is compared to the style with heavy brushstrokes normaly used around this time. ( Even the lettering is different on these strips. ) The style reminds me of the work of Russell Patterson. Could it be him helping Raymond out? Or is it Raymond himself testing another style? Guess we'll never know.

Speaking of Alex Raymond and inkers. The weeks leading up to these final two weeks of the "Bleak Prospects"storyline are also inked by someone else than the regular inker. In that case I'm pretty sure who the ghost inker is.



Looks like Frank Godwin,  doesn't it. :)

/Joakim.

3 comments:

Mike Lynch said...

Wow! Thanks for ID-ing who this was!

Alberto said...

Hello Joakim:


I myself have been long wondering who the heck inked those Rip Kirby strips. They look nothing like the rest, as you noticed. Yet, they do have something in common (the very thin, almost careless ink line) with a few 1943 Flash Gordon/Jungle Jim Sunday pages.


I cannot believe that Raymond himself inked them, as he was obviously much better than that. Nor were they inked by his assistants (his brother Jim and John Mayo on Flash/Jim and Ray Burns on Rip). I think that Raymond may have had a deadline problem here, so that he only delivered pencils to KFS and they had the strips inked by some obscure, inexperienced staffer. But it's just a wild guess.


Keep up the excellent work.


Best,
Alberto

Unknown said...

Sorry but I disagree somehow. I don't think they are this badly inked. Maybe it's a let-down compared to Raymond's own usual lines, but in itself it's not incompetent at all. The (stunning! I'll give you that...)original composition and anatomies are well respected and well represented.
Actually it's a much more pleasant inking than the one on the second example (and if this was Godwin's, he must have been very sick and in a hell of a hurry this day!...).