Number 390


Dunc and Loo come through


I found Dunc and Loo #5 at an antiques fair just a week ago. It's one of those moments that comic collectors live for. I've been writing about John Stanley, posting stories, reading his stories posted on other blogs, and so it was synchronicity finding this comic in the midst of a stack of otherwise common '80s super hero comics.

Further synchronicity occurred last Sunday when Frank Young of Stanley Stories posted stories from Around the Block With Dunc and Loo #3. The comic book gods had to be interceding in these events.

These two stories from #5 are wonderful. The gags are funny, the characters are funny, the drawing is great. Bill Williams drew Dunc and Loo in a vibrant style with a fluid brush line, perfectly complementing Stanley's layouts.

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Number 280

Sexy John Stanley

Besides strips about little kids, Little Lulu and Nancy, in the early '60s John Stanley did some teenage books, including Around The Block with Dunc & Loo and Thirteen Going On Eighteen.

This is an example from Dunc & Loo #2, Jan.-Mar. 1962. Stanley pokes some sly fun at teenage hormones with a story about Dunc's plot to take some sexy pictures of his girl, Beth, with a typically hilarious Stanley outcome. While the layouts and script are by Stanley, the Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide credits the art to Bill Williams.

As a teenager in 1962 I had a problem with Dunc & Loo. Even in that distant and long ago year teenagers didn't dress like Stanley's teenagers. They had a style more from the 1940s than the 1960s. Dunc has a bowtie, which would have had him laughed out of my high school, and the hat Loo is wearing is strictly, well, old hat!

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