Johnny Comet
On January 28th,1952, twenty-four-year-old, Frank Frazetta, secured a job working on the action-packed newspaper comic strip, Johnny Comet. Peter De Paolo, a racecar driver who won the Indy 500 in 1925, was credited as the writer while Frank Frazetta was the lead artist. It was told years later that Earl Baldwin was the actual writer behind the strip while De Paolo was more of a technical advisor on the project. Johnny Comet featured Johnny, a debonair racecar driver who had a striking resemblance to Frazetta. The story revolved around California midget-car races and fifty-lap showdowns. Unfortunately, the readership of Johnny Comet remained low throughout the premier year and the syndicate decided to drop the Sunday strip in early 1953. To this day, Frazetta's original Johnny Comet comic strips are highly sought after by collectors due to the superior drawing and inking Frazetta did during this time.
I love Frazetta’s ability to meld realism and cartoonishness into one work. There were many more realistically drawn strips in those days, but nothing close to his, which are totally unique due to, I think, his use of a certain cartoony flavor in the wild action sequences next to the beautiful and dramatic shading and lighting and composition of his panels.