Of all the artists working in the Milton Caniff style, Frank Robbins was the most spectacular. Most or all of his Johnny hazard was reprinted by Pacific Press, but unfortunately not always very well or from the best copies. Here are some early Sundays in their full glory.
In the comments Smurfwhacker asks if the colors are all right and indeed this is "one I did earlier". Eventhough I have improved my color restoration skills I remain in awe of those skills in some others (like for isntance the restoration of the Frank Frazetta illustration in the Craig Yoe book on the right of this). They seem to jave a knack or a trick or software I do not posess. My main aim here was to restore the black and white lines, which were not very well kept in the Pacific books. Here is a sample of one of the brownish scans I had to work with. As you can see, Robins did indeed use a lot of white here.
3 comments:
Some unusual color choices here. Did Robbins really use that much white space or did something wash out in the scans?
I believe it's the scans. I always remember the Sundays to be very colorful, but then I've only read the European prints, which I doubt they recolored, though when Humanoides reprinted some stories in France in the early 80s, they were entirely re-colored by hand, as most European albums at the time.
Johnny Hazard has been reprinted countless times in Europe, and at one point, the color Sundays where done in both English and Italian versions and printed (at a large size) in Malaysia!
Yeah, it's ironic that I comment on the bad condition of the reprints and my color restoration on these is not as representative as it should be. The Pacific Comics reprints were mainly very bad on the black lines, which is what I tried to save here. Unfortunately, these early ones were from very brown copies, so I did indeed have to lose something in the restoration - mainly some of the brownish yellow that was also in there. And even then, if you look closely, you'll see some flecks of orangy yellow in the tex balloons. But he did use that much green on these pages and the colors do represent what was there.
Post a Comment