Deeds That Thrilled Australia! was an illustrated feature in the Australian Woman's Weekly that ran for fifteen weeks from it's first appearance on August 16 1941. Readers were encouraged to mail in their own wartime experiences and tales of unsung heroes to the magazine with a selection of them then vividly Illustrated by Noel Cook, a regular contributor of gag cartoons and painted illustrations to the Weekly.
November 22 1941
November 1 1941
November 15 1941
November 8 1941
October 25 1941
Deeds That Thrilled Australia © Estate of Noel Cook Source: trove.nla.gov.au
Thanks for posting these Matt and Happy New Year.
ReplyDeleteThe loose gestural art style is interesting I can't decide if I like it or not. It nicely conveys the scary intensity, the energy and the fog of war. Yet it lacks the authenticity that detail brings to these kinds of comics. For example in the last strip you posted the German Tank looks different in each panel. So I don't know. Of course the reality is the Artist is unlikely to have had accurate reference material for detailed drawings at the time during the war. Plus no doubt tight deadlines. Means speedy gestural drawings was the only option.
Thrilling stuff indeed.
ReplyDeleteI think like a lot of artists of this era, they worked in multiple styles, with comics or their equivalent being some of the more hastily created work. I have other examples from this era of Noel Cook to post that show him working in a simplified big foot style for gag panels and also paintings in a lush illustrative style to illustrate pulp work. It may well have been a case of equating the the time put into their work with what they were getting paid. Australian artist from the same era Virgil Reilly is a great example of this.
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