"'Look,' Browne said, 'St Patrick's day is coming up. You're taking a pill that is turning your urine blue..."

It's St Patrick's, the day of the year when it is customary to needlessly turn everything green, like the Chicago River in this fine photo taken on this day two years ago (courtesy Wikipedia.)
I find myself reminded of the great cartoonist Stan Drake, only because in Comics Between the Panels (by Duin and Richardson, Dark Horse, 1998) which is perhaps my favorite history of comics because it is entirely anecdotal and unpretentious, there is this anecdote:
"In the late 1940s. Stan Drake strained his prostate while digging post holes and putting fences around his house. Worried about a discharge, Drake checked with his doctor, who gave him some pills to take care of the problem. But the good doctor warned Drake that his urine would run blue for the next week.
'Pure blue,' Drake said. 'For about a week I'm pissing blue.'
When wordof this phenomenon got aropund the office at Johnstone and Cushing, Dik Browne dropped by to see Drake with a small brainstorm.
'Look,' Browne said, 'St Patrick's day is coming up. You're taking a pill that is turning your urine blue. But if you don't take it one day, the color will be weakened. And since you normally piss yellow, and Wednesday is St. Patrick's Day...'
Say no more. Drake said. 'So, on Tuesday, I didn't take a pill. And Wednesday morning I let a little squirt come out and, Jesus Christ, it was green. At noon, Dik had gone down the hall and invited everone on the 14th floor of Johnstone and Cushing into the men's room. So, I took it out and peed this brilliant green piss on St. Patrick's Day.'

I'm almost as fond of Drake as I am of Leonard Starr, whom I discussed here a couple of months back. Drake started the Juliet Jones daily strip in 1953, with Eliot caplin writing. It was fast paced, with snappy dialogue. Even though he used polaroid photos for reference for most of the figures, he had a way of exaggerating the histrionics just so, showing the graphic wit of a true cartoonist:

Anther quality I love about his work is his very acute sense of place:

And the way situations could be expressed very succintly in a single panel:


The above samples are from the first year of the strip, taken from the first of the three archive volumes published in the late '80s by Arcadia of Greenfield WI, whom I know nothing about. Enthusiasts chasing further can find up to ten volumes in Spanish, though of fewer pages each which makes it all overlappy.

Drake had a lighter touch in his work of the '60s here's a gallery of original dailies for sale, but you can enlarge and read.

I think this is a site belonging to Drake's son. It has some good photos of the artist.

Prof Mendez wrote a splendid essay on Drake, but it's not up at his site, although his opening page has a gorgeous colour example of Juliet Jones which can be enlarged to screen size.

There's another technique I mentioned in my piece on Starr that is beloved of this school of strip art and that's the 'talking building'. This fell out of vogue a long time ago, presumably because my generation are so po faced serious and found it too cartoony and unreal. I don't understand any of that and I love to look at it. It's a way of changing scene without a bridging caption and it makes more sense than 'meanwhile back at the ranch' which belongs to an older world that moved so much slower. It makes for variety during a conversation, and also adds to that constant sense of place that I referred to above.
It also added a great deal to an overall homogeneity among artists working in the 'photoreal style' (as Prof Mendez has dubbed it), which I like. I've always been more interested in the similarities between artists than in the differences. Thus this little situation appeals to me no end. The first panel is by Drake, from the 1970 sunday page in which Juliet Jones marries Owen Cantrell. It's the opening panel and presumably Drake has used a photo of new York buildings from his clip file of magazine and newspaper cuttings. Coincidentally, Al Williamson, another master of the photoreal style who had to wait until 1967 to get his own daily strip, Secret Agent Corrigan, had already used this same photo for reference in a short story in 1964 in the first issue of Creepy magazine (the story about the cartoonist's assistant, Baldo Smudge).
Anyway, compare the two. Stylistically they are interchangeable.



(In Williamson's own copy I imagine he has long ago filled in the annoying gap between the building and the edge of the balloon at the extreme right. If he's online he's probably even now applying ink to his computer screen.)