So this new colored Gottfredson collection has come out and I can’t find any previews of it anywhere. If I’m missing something could someone post some preview pages here? Would like to see how the book looks before I buy it.
As the editor, I'm pleased to share some pages. I'm really proud of Scott Rockwell, Susan Daigle-Leach, Erik Rosengarten, and Digikore Studios (Manik Tilekar, Abhishek More and gang) for their color work in here.
Some stories are reproduced from earlier Gemstone remounts, but the majority of these remounts and coloring jobs are effectively making their debut here. (One was done for Boom, but received a severely limited circulation—MICKEY MOUSE CLASSICS: MOUSE MAYHEM was canceled midway through its press run, and I believe less than 100 copies ever got out.)
Thanks, Those samples look really good! The coloring is bright and interesting without being painfully modern compared to the art. Will most likely get this.
That shows how far printing and coloring technology has come, if you can get the colors to still look good underneath all of those screen tones. Back when Gladstone printed comics on newsprint, printing it in color looked muddy with the tones left in, and it was labor intensive to remove the dots from the stats they worked from.
As the editor, I'm pleased to share some pages. I'm really proud of Scott Rockwell, Susan Daigle-Leach, Erik Rosengarten, and Digikore Studios (Manik Tilekar, Abhishek More and gang) for their color work in here.
Some stories are reproduced from earlier Gemstone remounts, but the majority of these remounts and coloring jobs are effectively making their debut here. (One was done for Boom, but received a severely limited circulation—MICKEY MOUSE CLASSICS: MOUSE MAYHEM was canceled midway through its press run, and I believe less than 100 copies ever got out.)
This made me both buy the book AND create an account. I look forward to receiving the book after having completed the Gottfredson and Rosa library sets. Can you tell us if any more volumes (in color) will be made are will this just be a one off?
Post by Scrooge MacDuck on Nov 26, 2018 10:29:32 GMT
Wonderful job as always, Ramapith! Probably the only thing "wrong" with those sample pages is the irregular layout, but I know that can't be helped if you want to preserve the original art *and* have vertical comic pages.
Glad you like it, MacDuck. Italy's I MAESTRI DISNEY and TUTTO DISNEY Gottfredson reprints, some fifteen years ago, were among the first to use this vertical layout—for exactly the reason you mention.
For a variety of reasons, it seemed best to try out the same format at Gemstone in 2006, and we met with resounding success—so more recent Boom, Fantagraphics, and IDW uses of recolored daily strips have been handled the same way.
Italy's I MAESTRI DISNEY and TUTTO DISNEY Gottfredson reprints, some fifteen years ago, were among the first to use this vertical layout—for exactly the reason you mention.
Yuppie! For once I get to correct the encyclopedic Ramapith. (Even if this is just a basic trivia.) In Topolino (pocket version) Gottfredson's story were on three strips since day one! Indeed, in issue 1 from April 1949 there was the first part of The Man of Tomorrow on three strips, mostly in b/w with a few colored pages:
I actually own this precise version of the story from 1949, since it was reprinted in this book given for free with a newspaper in 2005. It is a series covering the history of Topolino magazine, one volume per year, from 1949 up to 2010, and featuring of course the most famous stories as they were printed in that year. Of course I also own the American version from the Fantagraphics library. But I must admit that I have not yet read the original one. So I actually only know The Man of Tomorrow in this 1949 version (maybe translated by Martina?). (Together with the newspaper and the volume mentioned above they also gave us the full reprint of issue 1 of Topolino.)
So, all Gottfredson's stories starting from The Man of Tomorrow were firstly published on three strips in Italy and then reappeared in the original strip formats (tipically coloured) only many years later, when receiving a more 'prestigious' reprint.
Something similar happened even for Gottfredson's comics from before the war, but in that case by turning three original strips into four-tiers, since Topolino was as big as a newspaper back then:
Italy's I MAESTRI DISNEY and TUTTO DISNEY Gottfredson reprints, some fifteen years ago, were among the first to use this vertical layout—for exactly the reason you mention.
In Topolino (pocket version) Gottfredson's story were on three strips since day one!
Oh! I'm actually well aware that Italy has a long tradition of three-strip (and other-strip) remounting—and so do we! Remember, we had such remounts in the early 1940s WDCS ourselves.
What I'm talking about now is the specific more recent technique where the panels' original newspaper width is kept as-is, so the three (or four) strips in the row are often of a varied width, for more of a stylized, almost geometric layout.
Here's an example from "Love Trouble," the first story I remounted this way (for WDCS in 2006), modeled stylistically on Disney Italy's MAESTRI and TUTTO reprints of "The War Orphans" and "Robinson Crusoe," respectively (which I would show too for comparison, except that I'm not physically near my copies of them)...
Man, I wish somebody would do something proper with all this great stuff in Germany... we're pretty much Gottfredson-desert as far as recent publications are concerned. After the Italian series, now there's this new colouring available, and nobody uses it! Depressing!
In Topolino (pocket version) Gottfredson's story were on three strips since day one!
Oh! I'm actually well aware that Italy has a long tradition of three-strip (and other-strip) remounting—and so do we! Remember, we had such remounts in the early 1940s WDCS ourselves.
What I'm talking about now is the specific more recent technique where the panels' original newspaper width is kept as-is, so the three (or four) strips in the row are often of a varied width, for more of a stylized, almost geometric layout.
Here's an example from "Love Trouble," the first story I remounted this way (for WDCS in 2006), modeled stylistically on Disney Italy's MAESTRI and TUTTO reprints of "The War Orphans" and "Robinson Crusoe," respectively (which I would show too for comparison, except that I'm not physically near my copies of them)...
I suspected that I had not understood your post, it seemed implausible that you did not know that!
I like this versions with the irregular layout and original size of panels. It would be puzzling for a reader who's unaware of the original form, pushing him to wonder what is the purpose of the restricted tiers here and there. But nowadays Disney comics book remind of the fact that these are strip stories, so the reader knows what's going on.
I have a Gemstone issue of WDCS from 2006 featuring another Walsh-Gottfredson's story - the one where (P)Flip makes everybody say the truth and Pete has his leg prosthesis at washing. But this one is on strips, and although nicely coloured, it was not completely pleasant to read it, shrunk and all.
That Pflip story (in WDCS 667) was a one-time-only attempt at a different format for the shorter postwar strips—would they still read well that small, and what would readers think?
Readers were glad to see the story, but nobody liked the size. (For the record, this ended a plan to reprint "The Moook Treasure" in that same format... "Mickey Mouse Joins the Foreign Legion" replaced it on the Gemstone schedule.)
Wondering if it’s to the secondary market I must go at this point.
That's surprising. It seems to be available on Fantagraphics' own site. It's also available to order at Barnes and Noble. Maybe Amazon is just temporarily out of stock for some reason?