Tuesday, October 13, 2009

The Kelly Pages: Comic Jack Kelly II

Hello!

I found another great Maverick comic album (annual), this one with Jack Kelly shown solo on the cover. (I hope he notices that desperado in the yellow shirt in time!) This annual contains stories as well as black-and-white comics starring Bart Maverick.

I discovered that most of the British annuals for Maverick and many other popular TV series were illustrated by one artist, Walt Howarth. Sadly, the prolific Mr. Howarth passed away in 2008. However, there's a commemorative MySpace
page for Mr. Howarth that includes this wonderful gallery of his TV annual covers. [UPDATE: The MySpace page and gallery are unfortunately gone, but there's a nice blog post about Mr. Howarth here, and another look at his life and career is here.]

On his page, Mr. Howarth is quoted as saying that he based most of his TV character drawings on photographs, but he wished he'd had a VCR back in the early days so he could have sketched the freeze-framed images. Well, I think he did all right with just the photographs--JK really looks smashing on that cover. :)

I have two more of Mr. Howarth's Maverick annuals that I'll post about in the near future.

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