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Highly appealing original artwork for the strip published on 3 January 1935, by the creator of Flash Gordon, signed by the artist in the third panel. Alexander Raymond's place in the history of cartooning "is secure, established by his brilliance as an illustrator of four successful and influential comic strips … His work and [Harold] Foster's created the visual standard by which all such comic strips would henceforth be measured" (ANB). "In late 1933 King Features officials began looking for features to compete with two popular Sunday comic strips offered by rival syndicates - Buck Rogers, space adventures in a science fiction future, and Tarzan, jungle action in the mould set byEdgar Rice Burroughs. Raymond submitted samples for both and was awarded a Sunday page with Flash Gordon on the bottom two-thirds and Jungle Jim at the top. At the same time, Raymond entered the syndicate's competition to find an artist for a new daily strip about crime fighting, which, in order to compete with the soaring popularity ofChester Gould's Dick Tracy and Norman Marsh's Dan Dunn - Secret Operative 48, would be written by the master of hard-boiled detective fiction,Dashiell Hammett. Raymond was selected to do this strip, too, and thus he began 1934 as the illustrator of three comic strips, a virtually unprecedented circumstance - two Sunday features and a daily strip … Raymond did Secret Agent X-9 for less than two years. His superb illustrations give the pulp fiction tales an unexpected patina of the haute monde: Dexter, Hammett's tough-guy hero, is rendered as a dapper fashion plate, and the women are elegantly stylish and very attractive" (ibid.). Hammett, the "dean of the so-called 'hard-boiled' school of detective writers" (Bruccoli & Layman, p. 225), collaborated on the strip from 22 January 1934 until 20 April 1935. In this fine example of Raymond's art, Secret Agent X-9 is on the case of a missing girl, the final panel including a get-away in an autogyro! Matthew J. Bruccoli and Richard Layman, eds., Hardboiled Mystery Writers: Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ross Macdonald: A Literary Reference 4-panel cartoon strip, pen and ink with blue pencil shading over graphite on Bristol board, image area 622 x 140 mm; signed by Raymond in the third panel; two titles for the strip in blue pencil on verso: "The sky's the limit" (struck through) and "Air pirates". In very good condition.
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