Tuesday 19 February 2013

Thursday 14 February 2013

Don't forget...

... that it's "hug-a-penguin"-day today!


Aka Valentine's day. Go hug someone!

XOXO

/Joakim.

PS. The pengunis are drawn by Hedvig.
Check out her artblog here: http://vixiearts.blogspot.se/

Monday 11 February 2013

Adventures during lunch hour

During lunch today I grabbed three new comic books from our racks at work (I work at Egmont Kids Media Nordic AB in Sweden.):
Nemi #1/2013, Rocky #1/2013 and Pondus #2/2013.

Always nice to have something good to read during lunch.
But I wasn't prepared for what I was about to see...

In Rocky I saw a new comic strip called "I ett samhälle byggt på hårdrock..." Cool! Always nice to see the work of a new artist.
Here's the first spread in Rocky including a presentation of the artist Jens Rasmussen:


I continued my lunch by flipping through the pages of Pondus.
But - Hey! - what's this?


Another presentation of the artist and the same strips. Odd...

Now, guess what I found in Nemi? Yes, you guessed it...


I asked around a bit and it turned out that the guy had sold the same material to three different editors. Trouble is that the three editors seems to have been unaware of this. (Or that's what I've heard.)
The result is that the same company are publishing the same strips three times in three different comic books on sale in January/February. And the same company also paid him three times for the same material.

What to say? This is either incredibly clever or ...


PS: Why pay to read the strips in the above mentioned comic books, when you can read them for free online? The author posted them on his blog four months ago.

Sunday 10 February 2013

More Buz!

Thanks to a reader of this blog here are scans from the new Buz book, so you can judge for yourselves. I don't have the book myself, but I'm more than happy to see how good these samples actually look. Especially after reading the Amazon review!
And the strips doesn't look "squeezed" as they did in the first volume. Great!

I have scanned the same strips from my old DLP editions for comparisation. The DLP strip is always the first and the FB the second. Enjoy!









Friday 8 February 2013

The trouble with Buz


Seems that the new volume of Roy Crane's Buz Sawyer got the same problems as the first one. (Covered in THIS post.)
Check out the review for vol 2 on Amazon by clicking HERE. Guess we have a case of low res scanned screen tones from bad sources again? 

Wednesday 6 February 2013

Roy Nelson

A small but nice Roy Nelson drawing.


If the current owner sees this and wants to sell the drawing:
By all means drop me a line! :)


Tuesday 5 February 2013

One cover – four versions

Have you seen cover Carl Barks drew for Uncle Scrooge 66? You know, the one with the horse.

Did you know that if you have the original US 66, any Scandinavian edition from the 60's or even the "Carl Barks Collection" you have an altered and partially redrawn version? We only recently published the un-retouched version in a collection covering "Kalle Anka & C:o" from 1968. And that's the one and only publication I'm aware of.

But first, let's take a look at what the cover looked like in Sweden back in '68.

And then what it looked like in the Carl Barks Collection.

And finally: The original black and white version of the cover.

Not only are none of the printed versions un-retouched but they are all different. It might be hard to spot the differences without seeing these images next to each other in large size, so I zoomed in on a few details to show you the some of the differences.
First we have the vacuum cleaner.


Then the mirror.
And finally one of the hooves.

Now, here's what I *think* happened.
1. Carl submitted his original cover to Western.

2. Someone deleted most of the thick shadows and altered a few things before the first publication.

3. When the cover was about to be printed in Scandinavia they didn't have the proof used for US 66 so they had to use the printed cover, stat it and fix things that turned out to be too dark in the process. Knowing that, you can tell that white out has been used to clean up the darkest parts. 

4. Again, when the Carl Barks Collection was prepared they didn't have access to the US 66 cover proof. Instead the printed cover was scanned and fixed digitally. This time closer to the original printing than in the 60's. A good restoration job given what was available.

Hopefully future printings will use the original Barks version of the drawing.