Mike Ludlow, late 1950s
What does it say about me that I spent five minutes looking at this image ignoring the girl and trying to figure out what the comic strips were supposed to be?
The one on the top is clearly a reference to Ferd’nand by Danish cartoonist Mik, although the presence of word balloons suggests either that Ludlow didn’t really pay attention or was going the extra mile to distance himself from the original. The single row of the middle strip looks like an army-set gag feature — the art looks a bit like Henry Boltinoff from here, but any classic midcentury cartooning from a distance looks kind of like Boltinoff; it could easily be a Beetle Bailey or Sad Sack reference too. The bottom strip is, I think, supposed to be Carl Anderson’s Henry — again, the word balloons are egregiously wrong, as is the use of space, but it kind of looks like Ludlow was getting bored with the idea anyway, and rushing to get it over, since the compositions are genuinely terrible, and nothing that looked that bad would ever have gotten in a mass-circulation paper in 1958.
