Post by Scrooge MacDuck on Jan 7, 2017 12:29:31 GMT
I'm not talking about colors, I'm talking about inking. For a significant part of his career, Strobl only did the pencils of his story and had other, less talented artists, such as Steve Steere, trace them with ink.
I don't agree. I wouldn't put him among my best artists, but he's good. I'm afraid you've only seen the part of his work that was badly inked. However, when the job was done more competently, he could indeed be very good and detailed, though his style is slightly more angular than usual Disney fare.
No, that is not in the colors! No idea why Strobl is so popular here, because in my home country Germany, he is one of the most worst artists!
I wouldn't say Strobl is "so popular" here in the USA. There are many Disney fans here who look down on Strobl's art, while there are others (e.g. Joe Torcivia and the late Chris Barat) who have defended it. I don't much like it in general, but now and then I happen upon a Strobl-drawn story where I'm impressed by the art. It's clear that he didn't just phone it in, anyway. And if Strobl drew the cover for Og's Iron Bed coa.inducks.org/story.php?c=W+DD++109-00 I'm here to say that that is the one non-Barks cover which in my childhood led me to read its comic again and again.
I don't see a problem Strobl, he was a very prominent Duck artist back in the day. Strobl's art was on model (definitely more on model than Rosa's overly detailed ducks) and clean and brings me fond memories of the classic era of US published Disney comics. I
I personally don't see it, is art wasn't flashy but it was solid and dependable. I'd take many of those old stories over some of the bland European content that we get saddled with.
the american artist that's forever most confused me is paul murry. I remember him from my childhood as drawing boring, stiff, flat, uninteresting cartoons, and then google him and find a ton of (admittedly lewd) really good and cartoony and fun stuff.
I don't agree. I wouldn't put him among my best artists, but he's good. I'm afraid you've only seen the part of his work that was badly inked. However, when the job was done more competently, he could indeed be very good and detailed, though his style is slightly more angular than usual Disney fare.
No, that is not in the colors! No idea why Strobl is so popular here, because in my home country Germany, he is one of the most worst artists!
Growing up reading the 1940s and 1950s, reading the American and Dutch Disney Comics, for The Duck stories, I was exposed mainly to Barks, and a LOT of other artists whose Duck work I didn't like. Murry, Moores, and Bradbury all were very good artists working for Disney Animation, and drawing Mickey Mouse. But, I didn't like their style when drawing the Ducks. The other Western Publishing Duck artists were TERRIBLE at drawing The Ducks, according to my taste, except for Tony Strobl, who I rate as being 2nd after Barks (albeit a distant 2nd). He also suffered from his inker stiffening his figures. I know that, because I saw several of his original pencil drawings, which were VERY fluid from 1947- 1958, and decent between 1959 and 1964. ALL his inkers from 1959 through the end of his career in the mid 1970s made his figures TERRIBLY STIFF and angular, and his backgrounds angular and unlifelike. There was a tremendously large gap between the stiffness of the inking and his pencils, starting in 1959. That is why "his" artwork looked so inadequate. But, I saw some of his pencil drawings from 1963 and 1964, which were almost as fluid as they had been during the 1950s. The main Dutch story and cover artist at that time, was also not good at drawing The Ducks. So, I can see why some fans might pick Tony Strobl as one of their favourite artists. His 1952-1958 Duck stories had a fairly good quality of art.
(admin edit: your post formatting had gone bonkers and had massive ammounts of empty space, corrected it)
(admin edit: this post quoted mr. rob's post, with the massive amount of erroneous blank space. corrected this)
I don't think that was only the inkers. I also think Strobl has never drawn liquid, always angular. And Donald was too small and often looked like the three nephews! I have also seen pencil drawings by Strobl and this looked just as bad. I'm also registered in some German Disney forums and Strobl likes almost none, some even call him the worst artist!
I think Strobl was quite a good artist. He was especially good at drawing characters from 1960s Disney animation, like Ludwig Von Drake and Moby Duck.
Here's my list of favourite Duck artists (can't come up with a definite order, though Barks is obviously my favourite):
- Carl Barks - Daniel Branca - Carlos Mota - Daan Jippes - Romano Scarpa - Massimo De Vita - Marco Rota - Mau Heymans - Jan Gulbransson - Miquel Pujol - Arild Midthun - Cèsar Ferioli Pelaez - Mark de Jonge - Jan-Roman Pikula (perhaps a lesser known artist; he works for the Dutch DD weekly, and mainly draws covers, illustrations and one-panel gags).
Last Edit: Jan 8, 2017 12:07:14 GMT by Scroogerello
- Carlos Mota - Jan Gulbransson - Jan-Roman Pikula (perhaps a lesser known artist; he works for the Dutch DD weekly, and mainly draws covers, illustrations and one-panel gags).
Yes! Great for the more unfamiliar artists and a full approval! The three are really good!
I think Strobl was quite a good artist. He was especially good at drawing characters from 1960s Disney animation, like Ludwig Von Drake and Moby Duck.
Here's my list of favourite Duck artists (can't come up with a definite order, though Barks is obviously my favourite):
- Carl Barks - Daniel Branca - Carlos Mota - Daan Jippes - Romano Scarpa - Massimo De Vita - Marco Rota - Mau Heymans - Jan Gulbransson - Miquel Pujol - Arild Midthun - Cèsar Ferioli Pelaez - Mark de Jonge - Jan-Roman Pikula (perhaps a lesser known artist; he works for the Dutch DD weekly, and mainly draws covers, illustrations and one-panel gags).
From your list Mau Heymans is really good so is Marco Rota. I'm not big on Branca and I'm not too familiar with some of the other ones on your list.
Post by Monkey_Feyerabend on Jan 23, 2017 11:47:42 GMT
My investigation in Disney comics is a great work in progress, so the following lists will most probably change in the future. Even in the near future.
WRITERS 1. Carl Barks 2. Floyd Gottfredson & Ted Osborne 3. Don Rosa (my mind would tell me to put him above Floyd&Ted in position 2...but my heart says: NO) 4. Floyd Gottfredson & Merril De Maris 5. Tito Faraci 6. Bill Walsh 7. Freddy Milton (am I the only one that likes the Milton/Jippes stories a little bit more when Jippes is only on the pencil?) 8. Romano Scarpa (if I only consider his Mouse stories from the 50's he would be in position 6 or 7 probably...) 9. William Van Horn 10. Kari Korhonen (but I have read just a few stories by this guy...he can potentially escalate this chart!)
If I would continue this list you would see appearing mainly Italian writers (and a few Dutch ones). Because I am in this strange position for which I generally dislike the Italian traditional style on the ducks, but I must admit that most of the Egmont writers are pretty bad.
Special prize "auto-conclusive strips": Bob Karp (of course!) Special prize "I would like to read him more but I cannot easily find his stories": Evert Geradts Special prize "(not bad but) too much overrated": Casty Special prize "we will talk more and more about...": Teresa Radice (not much my cup of tea, because too romantic, but technically the most skilled modern Disney writer, in my opinion)
ARTISTS (some of them deserve multiple entries for the different periods of their career)
1. Floyd Gottfredson 1932-1938 2. Carl Barks 1944-1950 3. Al Taliaferro 4. Don Rosa 5. Giorgio Cavazzano 1989 to date 6. Mau Heymans 7. Volker Reich (man, would I like to see MORE of this artist in any language that I can read...) 8. Giorgio Cavazzano 1974-1979 (I call this period "the Franco-Belgian" Cavazzano) 9. Daan Jippes & Freddy Milton 10. Floyd Gottfredson from the 40’s and 50’s 11. Carl Barks from the 50’s 12. Marco Rota 13. Al Hubbard 14. William Van Horn 15. Romano Scarpa 1956-1963 16. Young Ben Veraghen (when he still did HDL with squinty eyes...I loved that!) 17. Fabio Celoni 18. Silvia Ziche 19. Daniel Branca 20. Carl Barks from the 60’s 21.Old Daan Jippes (from the 2000's, when he is not doing Barks, in other words)
Special Prize "I really do not get why people like": Vicar
As you can understand from this list, I do prefer artists able to provide characters with stong mimics and visual expressivity, no matter what his/her style is. This is why important, beautiful but not much expressive artists are out of the list: Carpi, Bottaro, Mottura, Sciarrone, ...
I've always known that Gottfredson wrote plots, and his scriptwriters simply established what characters said.
PS- Fallberg hasn't ever written any Gottfredson story. About his scriptwriters- I know I prefer De Maris and Walsh, but I like -more or less- all of them.
I didn't know this. I thought they collaborated on the plots. This is interesting to know.
Gottfredson was the only writer of Mickey's strips (plot & script) from 1930 to November 1932, that is for two and a half years. His last solo story is Mickey Mouse Sails for Treasure Island. From November 1932 to June 1943 he wrote all alone all the plots, letting others do the script, mainly Ted Osborne from 1933 to the beginning of 1938, and Merril De Maris from 1938 to 1943. Then from 1943 everything was signed by Bill Walsh (the plots too, not only the scripts).
You have put De Maris in your list of best writers, but not Osborne. This puzzles me: do you really consider Mickey's stories from 1938-1943 more interesting than those from 1933-1938? Personally, I would rather say the opposite. In any case, as I did in my list one should consider them in pair with Gottfredson. The fact that Floyd wrote the plot and did the final pencil makes me think that he often had the final word also on the script/staging of the gag. Not to minimaze the importance of Osborne and De Maris, of course: actually, you can see the breakthrough when in late '32 Disney assigned those scripters to Floyd...the staging of the gags improved considerably, in my opinion! By the way, Ted Osborne was also the one plotting and scripting all sindacated silly symphonies (he's the father of HDL and Granma Duck!), all Donald's sundays and all Mickey's sundays. So I consider him a key writer in the history of Disney comics. Maybe, in some perspective, the most important after Barks and Gottfredson.
I didn't know this. I thought they collaborated on the plots. This is interesting to know.
Gottfredson was the only writer of Mickey's strips (plot & script) from 1930 to November 1932, that is for two and a half years. His last solo story is Mickey Mouse Sails for Treasure Island. From November 1932 to June 1943 he wrote all alone all the plots, letting others do the script, mainly Ted Osborne from 1933 to the beginning of 1938, and Merril De Maris from 1938 to 1943. Then from 1943 everything was signed by Bill Walsh (the plots too, not only the scripts).
You have put De Maris in your list of best writers, but not Osborne. This puzzles me: do you really consider Mickey's stories from 1938-1943 more interesting than those from 1933-1938? Personally, I would rather say the opposite. In any case, as I did in my list one should consider them in pair with Gottfredson. The fact that Floyd wrote the plot and did the final pencil makes me think that he often had the final word also on the script/staging of the gag. Not to minimaze the importance of Osborne and De Maris, of course: actually, you can see the breakthrough when in late '32 Disney assigned those scripters to Floyd...the staging of the gags improved considerably, in my opinion! By the way, Ted Osborne was also the one plotting and scripting all sindacated silly symphonies (he's the father of HDL and Granma Duck!), all Donald's sundays and all Mickey's sundays. So I consider him a key writer in the history of Disney comics. Maybe, in some perspective, the most important after Barks and Gottfredson.
Ted Osborne is listed as the writer of the Sunday page that introduced HDL, while the writer of Grandma Duck's first daily strip is Bob Karp. However, it's known that "The Walt Disney Productions Story Dept. on February 5, 1937, sent Taliaferro a memo recognizing him as the source of the idea for the planned short, Donald's Nephews", and it's often said that that Grandma Duck is based on Taliaferro's mother-in-law. So, it seems Taliaferro occasionally wrote (or co-wrote) his daily strips and Sunday pages. I think this in an underexplored area of Disney scholarship, as there are too little info about the issue, or maybe there are enough info and they are just not easily accessible.
As for Gottfredson and his writers/co-writers, things seem clearer. From David R. Smith's 1975 interview with Gottfredson (which I read here):
(DS) How did the Comic Strip Department evolve? And did you head it because you were the only one there to start with?
(FG) Yes, and this is how it grew. It was a one-man department at first and then, as the need arose through the years, I just added men. I meant to tell you about Osborne and de Maris. Ted Osborne and Dick Creedon were writers on a comedy-variety radio show that ran on KHJ-- and I believe it was a daily thing, so it was a lot of work to write and produce. Wlat brough the two fellows out from this radio show to develop a Mickey Mouse radio show. They produced some shows, but it didn'tl last very long. When the radio show failed, Walt had to find something else for Ted and Dick to do. So, he gave me Ted Osborne to write the comic strip material, and Dick Creedon went into Publicity. Publicity had be then developed into a three- or four-man art department under Tom Wood, and they had one publicity writer.
Ted Osborne was my first regular writer. I had written everything up to that point. This was now in 1933, I think. So, from that time on, Ted and I worked together.I plotted the continuities because I was used to them. For some strange reason all of the writers I ever had through the years p to Bill Walsh were clever writers, but they couldn't plot. These fellows were good at dialog, and especially good at puns, and puns were used quite extensively in comic strips then, and they were good enough at it that they"ve been mentioned several times in teh anthologies about comics, but for some reason they just had no aptitude for plotting continuities.
So, I continued plotting the things, and the way we would work-- I would work up the general plot, the story line, for the continuities, and then we would sit down and talk out what we planned to do for the coming week. We'd pretty work out all the business, and generally the dialog, and then the writer would take this and break it down into strips and write it up on the typewriter. I'd go over that and edit it, and then I'd draw the things.
So Merrill de Maris at that time was in the Story Department, so he traded them. [Walt] took Osborne up to story and sent de Maris won to me. After three of four months, something like that, he became unhappy with Osborne in Story, and was now becoming impressed with what de Maris was doing on the comic strips, so he traded again. I was never consulted on these things. Walt would just call and inform me that he was making the switch.
(DS) Perhaps these guys were both good at comic strip but neither of them was good at animation story.
(FG) Yes, well, it was not only that, but I guess the bull sessions that we were having, and the fact that i was diredcting the general line of the continuities was the thing that made them hang together. Comic strip historians have asked me why with the three or four writers i had over the years, the general flavor and spirit of the continuities remained the same, and why the personalities of the writers weren't reflected in the stories that they write. I guess the answer is that I plotted all of them through the years, and I edited everything, and we had bull sessions and talkjed over the business. Well, this was what was happening to Osborne and de Maris. Working as we did down thee, they were turning out good work. But Walt thought that they were doing everything-- the plotting, the editing, and everything else. Finally, in late '37 or early '38, Walt made the last change and sent de Maris back to me and took Osborne back into Story. [...] De Maris was a very talented writer, but Osborne was sort of meachanical. e had a tremendous gag file, but he did everything by formula. So, i had to make a decision, and decided to keep de Maris. Osborne left the Studio then, and de Maris stayed with me until '42. [...] It developed that Bill [Wlash] was part owner of the Margaret Ettinger Advertising Agency in Hollywood, and h'd been working as a gag writer and public relations man for Burns and Allen, and also for Bergen and McCarthy. He was also a friend of Vern Caldwell's, and Vern had been trying to get him out here for quite a while as a publicity writer, but Bill was so big that the Studio couldn't afford to pay him what he had to have in order to join the staff. So Vern had talked to Hal, and said, "If Floyd could use him on the comic strips, then between the two jobs we could afford him". So, I told Vern that I would like to give him a try, and Bill joined the staff. I worked wiht Bill for the first two or three months quite closely. I had to practically rewrite everything that he did at first because he was so production-minded that it would have taken four strips to draw what he wrote for one strip. It was this sort of a thing with him. But all the talent ad ability were there; it was just a matter of working him into the process of learning the limitations of writing for comic strps. Of course, he eventually learned this very quickly. He was such a talented guy. [...] Then, he took over the writing and the plotting on his own, and all I did was edit as he'd bring these things in. We just couldn't get him to pare the dialog and the business in the strips down to the comic strip's limitations, so I said, "Look-- write everything you want into them. We would much rather have more things than we can use than not enough. You give them to me and I'll pare thel down to the comic strip format, so that they'll work in there". So, this is the way we worked together. Gonzy-- [Manuel] Gonzales-- especially would get so exasperated. I wouldn't attempt to cut out the description and the business with the props so much as I would the dialog when I edited them. Then I would draw in just what I felt was the best of the props and the business that he suggested, and leave the rest out. But Gonzy had a problem with this because he wanted to draw everything in, and he couldn't. There was too much work, and he beefed about Bill writing so much stuff into it all the time to apoint where we began to refer to Bill as "Cecil B. de Walsh".
Last Edit: Jan 25, 2017 15:29:31 GMT by drakeborough