Post by captaingrapple on Oct 3, 2022 19:00:15 GMT
Sorry, "racist" was a poor choice of words, but certainly "featuring outdated stereotypes that might come off as insensitive today". If I was a Disney exec I would be wary of publishing such material, even if the target audience is mainly grown collectors. Most of us can understand the historical context and be fine with it, but what if some young kid reads this? And this isn't some historical archival organization - it's Disney. They have a certain brand + brand values, and "insensitive racial stereotypes" certainly ain't one of them. I feel like some of the cencorship critics here miss this point completely.
I get why anxious Disney executives impose censorship, I just think they are being oversensitive. These books are too niche and the racial steriotypes too mild to cause any real hullabaloo. And what if some young kid reads it? It won't hurt them.
Folks are really missing the forest for the trees here. Both the censorship and the colors are small details that don't detract from my reading enjoyment at all. The censorship is actually an improvement, if anything - I prefer my Disney comics not to be racist.
Surely you folks can appreciate Disney not wanting to publish comics featuring outdated racial stereotypes?
No - not in a Library edition which is explicitly targeted towards collectors, and which started out with the UNCENSORED "Voodoo Hoodoo" for the first time ever in an American reprint. Your argument doesn't hold water. The censoring in a few of the recent volumes is ridiculous, which is proven by how it's also wholly inconsistent.
In regular comic books, such modifications are par for the course. But in a complete Library series, no.
Post by captaingrapple on Oct 3, 2022 21:52:04 GMT
Fair points, I just really fail to see the big deal. These are very minor changes, designed to take the edge off of some of the racial stereotypes - totally understandable. If I notice something cencored/altered, I just think "Alright, Disney wants to be a bit careful here, no biggie" and move on. The stories still read perfectly fine.
Fair points, I just really fail to see the big deal. These are very minor changes, designed to take the edge off of some of the racial stereotypes - totally understandable. If I notice something cencored/altered, I just think "Alright, Disney wants to be a bit careful here, no biggie" and move on. The stories still read perfectly fine.
Again, I wouldn't mind the changes in regular comic books. I just think a Library series should be the place where you can find the complete and unmodified ouvre of the author. That's one of the most important functions a Library has.
The thing is, the recent edits really had little or nothing to do with removing "racial stereotypes," anyway; for example, the word "mob" was replaced with the word "bunch" in "No Rest for the Rescued," the word "violent" was replaced with "angry" in "The Good Deeds," the word "Shanghaied" was replaced with "kidnapped" in "Under the Polar Ice", fake-Indian dialect uttered by fake-in-the-context-of-the-story Indians was censored while the dialect of real-in-the-context-of-the-story Indians was left untouched--the censorship was utterly random, insulting nonsense.
As for the three panels I posted, he probably does not mind gradient coloring, but that does not mean he would not like flat coloring more. And he certainly does mind the background coloring in the second panel I posted. Similar background colorings (meaning when an open panel without border has a background color) were removed in the Deluxe Lo$ book.
But that's not meant to be a background anyway. It's coloring used to accent a particular moment, in this case Scrooge's realization.
Of course, but why did the colorist think he needed to accent that moment? Did he think Don Rosa's line art was not impactful enough?
Because that panel isn't open, so the colorist (who may well be a "she", so why not use a gender neutral pronoun?) had to fill it with "something", and in that case made the choice to be a bit more adventurous than just repeating the previous panel's gradient. You need to put these color accents in when art is empty. Van Horn is full of these moments, I'm surprised you're not complaining in his case...
Because that panel isn't open, so the colorist (who may well be a "she", so why not use a gender neutral pronoun?) had to fill it with "something", and in that case made the choice to be a bit more adventurous than just repeating the previous panel's gradient. You need to put these color accents in when art is empty. Van Horn is full of these moments, I'm surprised you're not complaining in his case...
?? Of course it bothers me just as much when it happens with a Van Horn comic. I simply picked 3 Rosa panels as an example. And yes, the colorist had to fill in with something and they should have filled it with one solid color.
[In the Fantagraphics DRL] Don Rosa was presented with various coloring options (Egmont coloring, US coloring, etc.), picked one of them, then listed all the errors which then Fantagraphics corrected.
I'm afraid your description simplifies our process a little too much, Caballero.
Some of the time we, indeed, began with existing colorings (most typically Gladstone/Gemstone) and then corrected/changed things.
But in more extreme cases (often, where Don felt an awful lot needed to be changed), we went back to the lettered line art and recolored from scratch, to only *partly* match an existing source—in such cases, changing many more colors than simple "corrections" would imply.
[Don] did not have an input for everything and he did not request to change everything he wanted to. For example he most certainly did not specifically want Magica's [Victorian] clothing in "Of Ducks, Dimes and Destinies" to be that ugly pink color, yet it is pink in the DR Library because it was pink in the original coloring version Rosa picked and it's not technically incorrect so he did not request to change it.
Has Don actually mentioned this in an interview or message, or are you simply *guessing* he didn't want it?
In all fairness, "Of Ducks and Dimes" was one of the stories we recolored from scratch (based mostly, but not entirely, on the Finnish DRC—itself an improvement on the original Danish DRC). So if Don had told me he wanted Magica's clothing to be a different color, we could have done it. He made many color requests for the story, but not that.
I see no problem with gaudy Victorian clothing being pink, though, so maybe Don didn't either? Again, all of this contingent on what you may have seen him write elsewhere.
As for the three panels I posted, [Don] probably does not mind gradient coloring, but that does not mean he would not like flat coloring more.
Don's opinions have been known to change over time (like mine and anyone's), but he and I have agreed that we like some level of gradients. Reassessing the DRL LO$ stories for the Deluxe LO$ book, for instance, he wrote to me that "while some readers really hate... a lot of fancy color gradients in all backgrounds, I think it looks either very nice or at least okay."
In a more specific example, Don pointed out how the addition of a gradient could improve a scene in "Hearts of the Yukon" for the Deluxe LO$. "As long as we have this ability to do color gradients and GLOWS," he said to me of book page 300, panel 6, "could you put just a very tiny GLOW around Goldie’s window? I was always worried that readers would not notice the lit window in the cheap [1990s] weekly coloring style. But now you can do EFFECTS. Just the tiniest glow, please, to add drama to the image..."
I've found that fans of flat coloring in comics tend to feel their favorite artists would prefer it, too. But it isn't always so.
(This goes also for Carl Barks, who told me that he felt soft, computer-color gradients were a nice innovation for backgrounds; flat-colored characters could stand out more sharply in front of them—in the spirit of vintage Disney animation. Lots of nostalgists for Dell color disagree, and I've heard them assume Barks would share their view. But he didn't...)
And he certainly does mind the background coloring in the second panel I posted. Similar background colorings (meaning when an open panel without border has a background color) were removed in the Deluxe Lo$ book.
Here you're mostly correct. Don felt borderless panels with multicolored "background color blobs" (as we called them in production!) were unnecessarily distracting at the large size—he hadn't bothered to request we change those backgrounds in the original DRL, but asked that we change them for the Deluxe LO$.
Ramapith: What do you think of Fantagraphics copying the old Dell coloring like fish being red, wood always white, etc.? I have the feeling that Americans value contrast more than realism.
It has nothing to with American tastes in general, Meneerjansen.
The decision to copy Dell colors was something that the series founder, the late Kim Thompson, specifically wanted to do because a number of European Barks scholars/nostalgists suggested it—disliking the modern look of their own then-recent Egmont CBC.
(Without meaning to disparage Kim—a great guy who gave me one of my first breaks in publishing—I think Kim had the erroneous impression that Barks himself preferred the Dell colors.)
Admittedly, I've since had Fantagraphics' Murry reprints colored the same way; viewing them as of-a-piece, even if after about 1960 I think the color goes quite downhill.
because a number of European Barks scholars/nostalgists suggested it
No way any Barks fan specifically suggested the old Dell coloring. They probably simply suggested flat coloring, which Kim Thompson misunderstood. Again, I do prefer the Dell coloring to the garish gradient coloring of the first few CB Collection books, because at least it's flat, but if I were tasked with recoloring every single Barks comic, never in a million years would I try to replicate the Dell coloring.
I wonder if there's a market for a facsimile collection of Barks' work: high-resolution scans of the original printings, like the ones that exist for the European magazines and the first two issues of WDC&S. This would make the increasingly scarce and brittle original printings available to collectors, without necessarily abandoning the casual reader. It might also help prevent possible censorship, because you can't go and edit decade-old comics.
No way any Barks fan specifically suggested the old Dell coloring. They probably simply suggested flat coloring, which Kim Thompson misunderstood.
Look here at this announcement from Danish Barks scholar Matthias Wivel, written at the start of Fantagraphics' series. After criticizing computer-colored Egmont and Gladstone editions, Wivel says of the Fantagraphics edition that "Most significantly—thankfully—it will be recoloured in its entirety in flat colours, to match as closely as possible the colouring of the original comics."
The flatness is emphasized, but fidelity to the original comics is seen as just as praiseworthy—and mentioned in the same breath in the context of being a valuable goal.
I don't know Wivel well, but since he has ended up writing for the Fanta Barks books under Thompson and his successor, Mike Catron, it wouldn't surprise me if he were one of the people who urged Kim to mimic the Dell color. Either way, it shows that that sentiment was alive and well when Fanta's series was originating.
Even if Dell color isn't what I like best, myself, it's fair to allow that someone wanted it. Caballero, please try not to take the attitude that anyone scholarly has to agree with you (or with me—I don't think I like later Dell color any more than you do)...