We have a VERY special treat here for you Dan DeCarlo fans - this is the ORIGINAL ART for the short lived newspaper comic strip Willie Lumpkin drawn by DeCarlo, and written by none other than Marvel Comics’ Stan Lee! The strip ran for about a year and a half between 1959 and 1961, but the character lived on in Fantastic Four starting in 1963, with Stan himself playing Willie in his cameo in 2005’s Fantastic Four movie!
About the creation of the strip, we will just quote Wikipedia which itself was quoting from a 1998 interview with Stan Lee:
“Mell Lazarus had done a strip called Miss Peach, which used not panels but one long panel instead. I liked that idea very much, so when Harold Anderson, the head of Publishers Syndicate, asked me to do a strip, I came up with Barney's Beat, which was about a New York City cop and all the characters on his patrol who he'd meet every day and there would be a gag. I did some samples with Dan DeCarlo, and I thought it was wonderful. Harold said it was too "big city-ish" and they're not going to care for it in the small towns because they don't have cops on a beat out there. He wanted something that would appeal to the hinterland, something bucolic. He said, "You know what I want, Stan? I want a mailman! A friendly little mailman in a small town." I don't remember if I came up with the name Lumpkin or he did, but I hated it. I think I came up with the name as a joke and he said, "Yeah, that's it! Good idea!"
The artwork measure approximately 19x7”, and has some slight yellowing on the paper due to age. It is inked on sturdy Bristol board. While not signed, the names of “Lee and DeCarlo” are pasted on the first panel, and the “Publishers Syndicate” paste-up is still intact.
Dan DeCarlo, who passed away in 2001, is well-known for his wonderful work with Archie Comics particularly with is deft handling of the characters Betty and Veronica. Dan’s career with drawing cute girls in comics went back to the 1940s working for Stan Lee drawing the comic book Jeanie, Millie the Model, and the My Friend Irma comic strip, and later pin-up girl gag cartoons for Humorama. Dan began working on Archie Comics in the late 1950s, and has been credited with modernizing the Archie gang to be in step with their time. As a part of Archie Comics, Dan created Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and Josie and the Pussycats, named after his own wife Josie.
Be sure to check out our other auctions of Dan DeCarlo’s brilliant work!
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