Classic Adventure Strips No.2 Red Ryder, Rip Kirby, Johnny Hazard

Toronto, ON, Canada: Dragon Lady Press, 1985. Reprint . Soft cover. Very Good +. b/w Illustrations. Red Ryder® a popular American fictional cowboy from the 1940s, was created by Stephen Slesinger and drawn by artist Fred Harman. Harman was heralded as one of the finest Western pen and ink men in the industry and is known for his dramatic sense of perspective and authentic action. Harman also created the Western adventure comic strip Bronc Peeler in 1933. Beginning Sunday, November 6, 1938, Red Ryder was syndicated by Newspaper Enterprise Association, expanding over the following decade to 750 newspapers with a readership of 14 million in the U.S. Globally the strip has been produced in more than 10 languages. Rip Kirby was a comic strip featuring an eponymous character, created by Alex Raymond in 1946. Publication history Upon returning from World War II, Raymond did not return to work on any of his previous successful comic strips (Flash Gordon, Jungle Jim, Secret Agent X-9) but instead he began work on a new strip starring an ex-marine private detective named Rip Kirby, based on the suggestion by Ward Greene that Raymond try a "detective-type" strip. The daily strip was first published on March 4, 1946. The strip enjoyed enormous success and Raymond received the Reuben Award in 1949. During Raymond's years on the strip, the stories were written by first King Features editor Ward Greene and later following Greene's death, by Fred Dickenson. Some sequences were also written by Raymond himself. In 1956, Alex Raymond was killed in a car crash. The syndicate quickly needed a replacement and found it in John Prentice. Dickenson continued to write the series until the mid-1980s when he was forced to retire for health reasons. Prentice then took over the writing along with others. Prentice kept the strip going until his own death in 1999. The strip ended with Rip's retirement on June 26, 1999. Prentice received the National Cartoonist Society Story Comic Strip Award for 1966, 1967, and 1986 for his work on the strip. Over the years of publication, the strip was ghosted and assisted by many artists and writers, including Frank Bolle (who completed the last episode), Al Williamson, Gray Morrow, and Neal Adams. The final Rip Kirby strip, drawn by Frank Bolle. Frank Robbins (1917-1994) was a notable American comic book and comic strip artist and writer, as well as a prominent painter whose work appeared in museums including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, where one of his paintings was featured in the 1955 Whitney Annual Exhibition of American Painting. As a writer\editor, Robbins was instrumental in returning The Batman to his gothic roots. His story "One Bullet Too Many" was the first story since the Golden Age in which Batman would work entirely alone in an urban setting. Besides Batman, Robbins' comic book work appeared in Captain America, Detective Comics, Fear, Ghost Rider, House of Mystery, House of Secrets, Human Fly, Invaders, Weird War Tales, and Power Man, as well as comic-book adaptations of Man from Atlantis and The Shadow. Robbins created the Johnny Hazard comic strip in 1944, and did the strip until it ended in 1977