Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- We’ve come to the end of the posting of the great Carl Barks story, Luck of the North. Bill Peckmann, has been so kind as to send these scans on to us to post. We’ll finish with the newly recolored version of the story complete with airbrushed backgrounds. However, because of the complaints about this version – particularly in regard to the airbrushed backgrounds – we’re showing some of the other versions of the first of the pages in this section. We’ll start with these originals.

Let’s start with the cover. First, I’ll repost the background I’ve shown in the past. Following this is the newer version done for the Gladstone Giant reprint.

The original comic cover.

Bill Peckman wrote: This is the cover of the Gladstone Giant reprint, Nicely done.

B.P. wrote: With the Part 1 commentary about
original color printing vs. reprint color vs. a black and white print job,
I figured we could open with the first page of Part 3 shown in three versions.
Here’s the B&W page.

This is the original comic book.

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This is the Gladstone Giant reprinted page
followed by the remainder of the story.

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B.P. writes: One of the best reasons for getting the Gladstone reprints was the excellent and knowledgeable running editorial commentary by Geoffrey Blum in each Barks issue.
Only right that it should be included here.
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B.P. writes: Here are the endpaper and back cover gags from the original comic book.

(Sorry about my blue rubber stamping but even as kids we knew that these books were pure golden treasure!)

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You can find the first two parts here: Part 1 & Part 2.

- Bill Peckman continues to delight with some of the brilliant artwork he scans for my site. It’s a pleasure to post it and study it. Here, we have the comic book version of The John Ford/John Wayne film, “Wings of Eagles.” Here’s what Bill wrote:

Alex Toth‘s passion for aviation was only second to his love for art, so he must have welcomed and relished this assignment when it came in from Dell/Western Publishing. It was the comic book adaptation of the biopic movie “Wings Of Eagles” (1957). It also didn’t hurt that Alex was a big fan of the movie’s director, John Ford. Here’s hoping that the backlit computer screen will offset some of the printing press problems of those days of yore (It Does!) and make the pages look closer to what Toth had envisioned. The originals would have been an eyeful to see! Go to the Bruce Canwell and Dean Mullaney book, “Alex Toth, Genius Isolated” to see what Alex’s original Dell art work looked like before quite a bit of it was lost in the primitive pulp printing process.

So here without further ado, is John Ford, John Wayne and Alex Toth’s “Wings Of Eagles”!

The Front Cover

Inner Front Cover

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One of the best pages in the book, too bad the colorist
miscolored the big double panel. The bg. color should have
been the deep blue sea, not the light blue sky.

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- Here we have the continuation of the great Carl Barks story, Luck of the North. Pt. 1 was featured here. We pick up where we left off.

But first here’s a painting Barks did inspired by the original comic cover:

Art appears in “The Art of Walt Disney’s Donald Duck by Carl Barks”.

Luck of the North
Bigmouth Donald tricks his cousin Gladstone into a wild-goose chase
after a fake treasure map. and then, conscience-stricken,
chases him down through the polar bear-infested Arctic.

(Dell’s Donald Duck Four Color #256, December, 1949; see page 48).
Barks turned the cover concept into a nightscape, studded with
stars and haloed by the northern lights.
“That’s where I had my trouble,” he comments,”
in that northern lights effect at the top.
I found pictures of northern lights in some
Geographics and I kind of stole some.”

An afterthought, and Barks adds,
“I find water very difficult to paint.
It’s hard work, but I worked at this until
I got it to look halfway authentic.”

Has he ever compromised on a story idea because
of its difficulty? “It may be that I had the sense
to do that once in a while, but I doubt it. I generally just
plunged right in on an idea whether I was going to have
trouble or not. I’d start out with a simple idea,
and keep on elaborating on it until I had a
real complex thing going.”

Though one of Barks’ most famous stories,
this is the only painting of it he did.

The original comic cover.

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To be continued.
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- Here are some more comic book covers courtesy of Bill Peckmann. From his incredible collection, he’s sent us a blast of early covers by Harvey Kurtzman. Bill’s note reads:

Sorry, these covers are far from being pristine, but I thought it’d be neat to show Harvey Kurtzman’s comic book covers (TWO-FISTED TALES, FRONTLINE COMBAT and MAD) in the order that he drew them. These are from 1951.

Here comes some great drawing.

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More from Bill:

In issue No. 5 of ‘Frontline Combat” was one of Harvey’s classic war stories titled “Big ‘If’!”. No time like the present to send it along.

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- Bill Peckmann has sent a number of early Jack Davis crawings our way, so let me turtn it over to Bill:

After Jack left EC/Mad Comics in the late ’50′s, after Harvey Kurtzman’s “Trump” and “Humbug” magazine’s didn’t get the solid footing they so richly deserved and went belly up, and before Jack carved out that wonderfully successful niche for himself in the world of humorous illustration in the ’60′s, he had to really scramble for work to keep the wolf from the door. Here are some examples from that period from late 1958 to 1961. Jack would say that some of this art was done in his “fast” style.

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These first four western covers were done for
Stan Lee for Atlas Comics, later to become Marvel Comics.

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A cover for “Cracked” Magazine, Mad’s longest running rival.

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4 B&W pages from inside “Cracked”.
The first 3 pages are a spoof on TV show “Peter Gunn”.

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A single page (Kurtzman type) gag.

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This western magazine was published by Jim Warren
who also published Harvey Kurtzman’s “Help!” Magazine.
It was rumored that Harvey was also the editor of this book,
I don’t know about that.

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A 3 page gag from “Wildest Westerns”.

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Believe it or not, Jack actually did a Dell Comic book.

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4 pages from “Yak Yak”.

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All the art was sent in the chronological order it was done.

- Following up yesterday’s post of Walt Kelly’s Animal Comics, we have more of his covers for Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories. Not all of these were done by Kelly, but most are. These came fresh off of Bill Peckmann‘s hot scanner, and I thank him for sharing his amazing archive with us.

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by Walt Kelly

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by Carl Barks

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by Walt Kelly

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by Walt Kelly

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by Walt Kelly

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by Walt Kelly

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by Walt Kelly

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by Walt Kelly

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by Walt Kelly

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by Walt Kelly

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by Walt Kelly

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by Carl Buettner

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by Carl Buettner

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by Carl Buettner

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Pencils: Walt Kelly, Inking: Carl Buettner(?)

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Pencils: Walt Kelly, Inking: Carl Buettner(?)

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by Carl Barks

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by Carl Barks

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by Carl Barks

- Bill Peckmann sent scans of an incredible comic. It’s an early issue of Animal Comics (June/July 1947) with Walt Kelly‘s Pogo making an early appearance. The bulk of the magazine is the Pogo story, however there are a couple of other short pieces. We have doubt that Kelly did these other strips, (Jigger, Chuck Wagon Charley, Uncle Wiggily, and Rover), so if anyone out there knows, please drop a comment. Other than that, all I can say is enjoy and thank you Mr. Peckmann.

comic cover

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Jigger was done by the great John Stanley
of “Little Lulu” fame.

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- Last week I posted a bunch of beautiful covers to Walt Disney Comics from the 40′w. For the most part they were done by Walt Kelly, and they were stunning. Here, thanks to another beautiful lode sent me by the inestimable Bill Peckmann, are some more of these wonderful covers by Kelly (except where noted). They are all gems. You can see the hint of Pogo starting to peek through in the non-Disney, secondary characters. Such clear composition and such clean design.

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This is Carl Barks’ second cover that he did for “Comics and Stories”.

Many thanks, again, to Bill Peckmann for sharing his immense and invaluable collection.

-Previously, I’ve posted a couple of short chapters from the great Arnold Roth book, A Comick Book of Pets.

You can see this chapter on cats posted a couple of weeks ago.

Arnold Roth was born in 1929 in Philadelphia, Pa. He attended public school and was awarded a scholarship to art school. He started free lancing in 1951 and continues to do so. Mr. Roth has had cartoons published in The New Yorker, Time Magazine, Sports Illustrated, Playboy, Punch and the NY Times. He’s worked briefly in animation for John Hubley and Phil Kimmelman. He currently lives in Manhattan with his wife and two sons.

This was sent to me by Bill Peckmann for posting. Many thanks to him for this generous contribution.

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A double page spread

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- Bill Peckmann has sent me a stash of original comic book covers for the Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories. There are 20 in all, and they all are beautifully drawn and colored. It’s a real charge to see them; for the most part they’re the work of Walt Kelly, and it’s great to see how his comic styling develops. Bill wrote the following about them:

The issues of “Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories” are in order of publication, it’s not a complete run but it is a fun one. Being the number one selling title of it’s day, it’s easy to see why some of the kids put their names on the covers, I’m guessing they didn’t want to lose them or trade them off by mistake. (Trading comics and bubble gum cards in those days was always going on, easy way to save money.)

All of the covers were done by Walt Kelly, except the very first one (August 1942, “Goldfish Bowl”), that was done by Al Taliaferro, long time Donald Duck newspaper strip artist.

Here are the covers from December 1945 to May 1947.

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(Click any image to enlarge.)

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