Cookie Comics #1 was published in 1946 by Michel Publications
of St. Louis, Missouri. 48 pages plus covers for only a dime.
Instead of putting up little thumbnails of the pages,
I picked out some of the best panels from the story
to show you up close. There's a link at the bottom of this post
which you can click to download all the pages in one file.
Meanwhile...here's a sample of what you'll find inside Cookie #1--
Contrast in character design
________
Check out the shadow under the old guy's beard.
Really makes it pop! His head is as wrinkly as his suit!
Foreground + Middle ground + Background = DEPTH of staging
He does this in almost every panel.
Silly situations, funny drawings and painful violence. That's a cartoon!
Dan Gordon poses = mayhem
So much action and movement!
In the panel above, notice how the colorist
pushed Angelpuss back into the background
by coloring her in monotone.
...and these detail shots
are from a Jitterbuck solo story:
(check out the SOLID construction and anatomy on that dog!)
I love that shadow against the fence as the dog is climbing up!
Dan gordon puts in a lot of blacks like that in his inking
which really gives his drawings a super-solid feel.
The shadows also let us know that the dog's right leg is toughing the fence,
but his left leg is still trailing behind in mid-air.
You don't notice these details while reading the story because they go by so quickly, but if you stop and admire any of these pages in detail, you can really see what a master craftman and master cartoonist Dan Gordon was!
See that big black shadow on Jitterbuck's leg? You can just feel the weight of that dog against Jitt's body! Even the cans are rendered differently. And the light source is consistent and well-planned to give everything weight. But it's still so cartoony!
Dan Gordon excels at drawing the backs of characters' heads.
If you like these samples from the comic, you can download all these stories at once below. I've been experimenting with different methods of posting these comics, so I'd appreciate it if you'll leave some comments to let me know what you think is easiest. I just don't want to make people have to click and save thirty different images, because it really bugs me when I have to do that.
Click on the COOKIE #1 COVER below
to DOWNLOAD all of these stories
in one convenient 67Mb PDF file
...and remember...
If you missed the previous post where I shared
Cookie #20, you can find it HERE.
ACG Comics images © Roger Broughton 2009
For ALL the Dan Gordon posts, click HERE!
