Thursday, July 19, 2012

A Sure Bet

Thursday Story Strip Day.

Just a little Sunday only story from the Heart of Juliet Jones, showing why this probably was the best soap opera strip of it's time (with Mary Perkins as a close second).








As an added bonus I redid some of the first Sunday. Even a ralistic artist uses symbolic elements for graphic purposes. Take that funny black scribly blob in the fourth panel... what is that? And why is it there? I took it out to see how the page would have looked without it. What do you think? An improvement or the unneccasary tinkering of an artist who just can't stop?


5 comments:

Peter Huggan said...

yes, that's an improvement without the black blob...it may just be a dirty printing plate anyways. Thanks for showing these...no wonder Dave Sim is enamored by this strip!

Ger Apeldoorn said...

No, it's actually in the artwork. I can see the doodling penlines up close on my larger scans. I thik it is some sort of balance thing. He does the same thing on the second page, but there it is more obvious why. This is the sort of thing Jack Kirby would do in the fifties with abstract arches. But they were always sharplined. it's the ragged line that makes this disturbing to me, since this way it cannot be a shadow. Al Williamson used to do that sort of thing all the time as well. Evidence of an inker at work...?

fred.de.heij said...

Maybe Drake tried to influence the coloring. The orange is wrong, it should have been much darker. I think you could say the same about the last panel.

Ger Apeldoorn said...

Well, I almost added a note that I am not sure if the coloring was the same on every Sunday page. This page has the strange orange hue many Canadian papers have. I get the impression that there were guides for the color, but that each paper did it's own seperating...

Manuel Caldas said...

"I get the impression that there were guides for the color, but that each paper did it's own seperating"

No, each paper received three card plates (plus another one, for the black) with the colors separeded.