Mandrake the Magician - Feature Productions

New Zealand comics publisher Feature Publications operated out of Petone, Wellington from the early 1940's with a line up of comics primarily reprinting King Feature Syndicate newspaper strips such as Popeye, Flash Gordon, Mandrake the Magician, The Phantom, The Katzenjammer Kids, Bringing up Father and others.

Lee Falk's creation Mandrake the Magician debuted as a daily newspaper strip in American newspapers on June 11th, 1934, with a colour Sunday strip following on February 3, 1935. Mandrake the Magician is one of the last surviving adventure strips still being produced in America with Mandrake artist of the last forty years Fred Fredericks assuming writing chores after the passing of Falk in 1999.

Feature Productions produced 222 issues of Mandrake the Magician from the late 1940's until the early 1960's. The Phantom, another creation of Falk is the only other New Zealand published comic to surpass Mandrake the Magician with 556 issues produced by Feature Productions.

The gallery below features covers of the first twenty issues of Mandrake the Magician. Feature Productions' cover artists were not credited, and covers typically featured a redrawn panel from the interior comic.

Source:http://www.mandrakewiki.org/index.php?title=Main_Page

Australian Daybills

Australian daybill gallery amongst others at The Art of Movie Posters.

H. B. K. Hislop Laughs Cover Gallery

Gallery of Laughs covers from the late 1940's and 1950's by New Zealand Publisher H. B. K. Hislop.

Background notes of H.B.K. Hislop here. 

Earlier Laughs cover gallery here, here and here.

 

English Comics Diversion: Wonder The Comic Filled With Laughter Jan 19 1946

Homecooked Comics Festival 2013

Papers are piling up around literally and digitally so I'll be trying to make sense of them over the next week with a series of catch up posts.

A couple months back I manned a Pikitia Press table at the Homecooked Comics Festival in the Northcote, Melbourne. Homecooked drew a decent size crowd to the town hall who were more comics receptive than your typical con audience around these parts. Bernard Caleo conducted interviews and live drawing sessions on the main stage and the open 'roomy' layout of tables in the town hall made for a pleasant easy going atmosphere.

I had a lot of fun on the day, got to meet cartoonist Andrew Weldon, talk to a Turkish exchange student from Istanbul about modern and golden age Turkish comics, catch up with The Mars Volta and Paul Bedford, and scored a copy of Hard Evidence You're a Loser from J. Leigh Head. A wonderfully bizarre fully formed colour comic, from a cartoonist I was completely unaware of. I believe only available in a print on demand small run so far, but hopefully available more widely sometime in the future.

 Ersin Karabulut, one of the modern Turkish cartoonists recommended to me.

Bernard Caleo and Scarlette Baccini

Patrick Alexander and Bernard Caleo

Andrew Weldon 

 The Mars Volta swung by with these sweet home made t-shirts

Some excerpts from J Leigh Head's Hard Evidence you're a Loser.

Mirranda Burton and Gregory Mackay

Scarlette Baccini and Dan Hayward

David Blumenstein and Bruce Mutard

Laura Renfrew

Paul Bedford

Olive Oyl