Monday, January 13, 2014

Return To Drifter

Sunday Meskin Measures.

Another of Mort Meskins western stories for Prize in the mid-fifties. Interesting to see how he uses a conservative nine panel grid to tell a solid story. As with last week's installment, he uses some silent panel, too. I wonder if those were written into the script...

2 comments:

Diego Cordoba said...

I doubt very much that the silent panels were written into the script, especially back in those days. Most probably the writer would ask the artist to draw a scene were the rider jumps off his horse and into the river and manages to grab a branch and pull himself out of the water. Something that's impossible to draw in one single panel, so Meskin added some silent panels describing the scene with more drawings.

I remember when Argentine writer Carlos Trillo wrote a totally silent or pantomime series (without any words) and when the drawings came back, the editor asked the artist why was he giving credit to a writer if he hadn't written anything.

Ger Apeldoorn said...

I agree that the silent panels will probably have not been in the script. Still, Meskin does end up with a nice nine panel grid, which looks a bit intentional. And he did silent panles in the previous story as well. Did the writer allow for it after reading that one or was the story possibly done before that? Most intriguing possibillity would be that Meskin was allowed to do that (to these stories and not to any of his other work for Prize) because in fact he was the writer. But there is nothing in the records or his history to suggest he would even do that.