Isn’t the Internet amazing? A few years ago, I bought an offbeat Des Moines newspaper comic starring Charles Schulz’s Peanuts characters, illustrated by a cartoonist named Bob Davenport. Eventually, I scanned it and put it online. Then I heard from relatives of the artist who pointed me to more of his work.
And now I’ve heard from Paul Vandendael, who discovered some murals drawn by Sgt. Bob Davenport in a building in Reims, France in 1945–a building that was intended to be a hotel, but turned into an apartment building. Searching for information on Davenport, he found my site.
The murals are exuberant, earthy, at least somewhat offensive–and fun. And they’re in surprisingly good shape, although at least one looks to be either unfinished or missing part of itself.
Here they are–in the pre-Web days, what would the chances have been that any of us would have ever seen ’em?
