John Prentice, Zane Grey's Stories of the West #27 (Installment 7)

This is the culmination of the serialized posting of the artwork from the pages of Zane Grey’s Stories of the West #27, published by Dell Comics in  1955. It features the story “Zane Grey’s Roundup”, “A Pictured Edition of “Open Range”. In this post I present pages 31 through 33.

Since I only have 3 remaining pages, I’m filling out today’s post with some random Rip Kirby panels from Prentice’s run on the strip. These panels demonstrate why I’m thrown by the Zane Grey pages, in terms of i.d.ing the comic as being the work of Prentice, at least as far as the inks are concerned. The strip panels, done some 10 years later, show a whiplash bravura virtuosity not on display in the comic; the comic line quality tends to have a sameness to it whereas the strip has a delightful variety.

I am assuming the artwork presented here is by John Prentice, who took over the “Rip Kirby” syndicated newspaper strip after the creator, Alex Raymond, died in a car crash in 1956, though I can find no confirmation of that in my on-line research.