As previously noted one of the nice things about my obsession with Golden Age comic books is it helps to feed my other obsession; old comic strips. They provide samples of uncollected comic strips I’ve read about for years but never thought I’d actually get a chance to read, like, Ray Bailey’s Bruce Gentry.

As you can tell from the above newspaper ad promoting the strip Bruce was pretty much your standard two-fisted airplane driver type character. The kind of slightly bland All-American fellow who was constantly finding himself falling ass backwards into a pile of exotic locales, fabulous babes and life or death situations. It was one of those strips that debuted late in the war which had a respectable post-war run but never caught fire. It was published in France as Alain Carter, Pilote Detective…

..and Gantry was also the star of a 1949 Columbia serial that had more of a SF bent (it featured “flying discs” which some claim was the first cinematic appearance of a flying saucer).

At least one of the reasons why the strip never catch fire was it was competing with Steve Canyon, which covered a lot of the same territory as Bruce Gentry did but had the advantage of having the muscle of Field Enterprises behind it. That and of course Milton Caniff. Bailey had been an assistant on Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates and Male Call and after Bruce Gentry closed shop in 1951 he became Caniff’s assistant on Steve Canyon (and did some of the Steve Canyon comic books for Dell). But Bailey had one more comic strip in it, Space Cadet Tom Corbett and he also provided art for such comic book titles as Turok, Son of Stone and Mandrake the Magician, His final work was for Tower Comics Undersea Agent.

Eight issues of Bruce Gentry were published but after #2 the comic switched from comic strip reprints to “all-new” stories that were vastly inferior to Bailey’s work.