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| Images copyright MARVEL COMICS |
By the time the last comic in this particular post went on sale, the green spot-colour which had graced some pages of the weekly MIGHTY WORLD Of MARVEL had disappeared. Apart from the front and back cover, the few full-colour pages were already long gone and, sad to say, MWOM was beginning to look like a sad imitation of its former self.
Dull grey tones which obscured the art were becoming a prominent feature of the Marvel periodicals and did them no favours at all. In fact, it's surprising that, over in the States, those responsible for the weeklies allowed the situation to continue for so long, because the printing was truly dire.
And make no mistake - by and large, the murky mess was the fault of the printing, because, as I understand it, the team responsible for the tones in Marvel U.S. 'black & white' mags was the same one who attended to the British weeklies - and the American mags turned out fine.
Take a look at the full-page ad for The AVENGERS further down - believe it or not, I've lightened it up a bit so that you can see it better, but it's still far too dark in places - to the detriment of JACK KIRBY's & DICK AYERS' art. Some of the pages in later issues were almost black, so impenetrable was the poorly printed Zipatone (Letratone to us) which afflicted the mags
However, despite all that, happy memories abound on sight of these iconic images of yesteryear - for me, anyway. Let's hope that they produce the exact same result on you if you were lucky enough to own these mags when they first came out - 40 years ago. (Wow!) All together now...
"Make Mine Marvel!"
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I see what you mean about it being too dark A GOOD grey wash can enhance B&W stories - take a look at some of the POTA work and it's almost photographic. Did TMWOM eventually get the balance right, as I don't seem to remember anything like this when I joined them (when POTA merged)? I DO like those green tones in The Hulk, though.
ReplyDeleteIf I recall correctly, JP, they got the balance more or less right before abandoning the process altogether.
ReplyDeleteSo you finally caught up with me, or maybe I caught up with you!!! Why? Because I began reading MWOM with #43 in the summer of '73, now over 40 years ago!!! I remember that weekend so well, i bought MWOM on the saturday morning and I got the bug and so I went back to the newsagent sunday morning (before it closed, as newsagents closed midday on sundays in those days) and bought my first issue of S-MCW!!! That all started my 2 or so years association with the British Marvel comics and DC from the USA! It all seemed such a long period in my life, but really it was only a few months when Marvel and DC comics (and the occasional Charlton) were my number one childhood passion.
ReplyDeleteSo, what do I do now? Stop reading your blog?
Feel perfectly free to continue - it doesn't cost a cent!
ReplyDeleteInteresting that you wrote that it doesn't cost a cent and not that it doesn't cost a penny!
ReplyDeleteI forgot to add that the grey washes did not put me off when I first started reading MWOM and S-MCW in 1973. But I soon started noticing the artwork on the letter pages had no tones, eventually I began to think that the artwork on those letter pages looked so much better than the strips.
Another factor was that those spot illustrations were shrunk down more. I am not too sure that the art looked so great on the larger British pages. I really wanted the British weeklies to be smaller in dimension and just crisp black and white pages!
I still recall that the grey tones certainly did no favours for the scratchy artwork of Don Heck on The Avengers or sometimes Vince Colletta's inking on Thor.
Nearly 6 years later and finally getting around to responding to your comment. I'm sure I intended to at the time, but perhaps I had several to answer all in one go and yours got lost in the chaos. Yeah, those heavy grey tones didn't really do any favours to anyone's art - a lot of it was just a murky mess that was sore on the eyes. Thank goodness they eventually got it sorted.
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