Friday Comic Book Day.
I kow what they say: "That Mort Meskin is a pretty good atist, but does he hold up in black and white?" Well, here you go.
Seriously, as much fun as it is to see these black and white stories taken from two British reprint books, I would really love to see one of these done in good colors. The coloring that Prize did itself wasn't really all that great. If I was to ever reprint these, I'd have a look at a new coloring that looks of the period was gives a bit more variation than the slap-on colors of the original.
Coloring these can be a challange - Mort Meskin did not work with closed lines, which probably is why his work can look so lively. That means you can't do fill-in computer colors, but you'll have to either create masks or do it the oldfashioned way, with a brush. The look I'd go for is that of the newspaper strips at that time. Take a look at the Sundays I showed from The Heart of Julia Jones a couple of mnths ago. Like Meskin, Stan Drake used a profoundly open inking style, yet still the coloring makes it all come alive.
Boomerang! Justice Traps The Guilty. August 1953.
Fatal Mistake. Justice Traps The Guilty #54. September 1953.
Rebound. Justice Traps The Guilty #55. October 1953.
Murder Will Out! Headline #66. July 1954.
6 comments:
His stuff always looked like early kirby to me, which is great!
Thanks, George.
An oddity in these English reprints:
Justice Traps the Guilty # 9 (Reprinted from Headline 73 v.11, n1 (Prize) # Sept 1955) —there are 2 panels on page 4 in the story “Final Winner” that are drawn by Meskin, but nothing else in the story. Either he was asked to do "fixes" or the story was passed around. I don't recall who the main artist was.
Stven, I don't think I have that one. Or the original. Was the redrawn only in the British rerint or also in Headline #73? You seem to be saying the former, which really is odd.
I think I only have the reprint. I'll have to check.
I do wonder how the UK reprints were done. Were they from stats? Original art? The line weight seems heavy all around, almost like they used bleached pages or dropped the color out.
As I understand it the US reprint used plates, but they were either so poor or they reused them so much, that the line quality actually changed during the print run.
In some cases it is know that US reprints had art of stuff that was later changed in the US books after the stats were made.
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