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I must admit to having mixed feelings about BIG FINISH's collection of The AVENGERS strips from DCT's DIANA comic weekly for girls published in the 1960s. While the art is terrific and more than deserving of a wider audience, the finished result could have done with more care before being released to the panting public.
First of all, the pages would greatly benefit from being printed in a larger size, so that the art by EMILIO FREJO and JUAN GONZALEZ could be appreciated at its very best. Secondly, the book claims that the pages have been 'restored', but there are speech balloons and captions missing from a few panels. This means that the pages were sourced from the original art, but surely the printed comics could have been used to supply replacements for the missing lettering?
(Interestingly, some of the lettering on some of the later pages looks as if it's been redone, as the balloon and caption shapes don't match the originals.)
Thirdly, the text material at the back of the book suffers from insufficient spaces between many of the sentences, and the word 'hear' is rendered as 'here' in one instance. So while it's great to see these beautifully illustrated stories, the book has a certain slapdash air about it which prevents it being the polished publication it could and should have been.
Maybe Big Finish will do a second edition one day and do these iconic pages justice. We can only hope so. Still, it's worth having just to view some terrific artwork from the swinging '60s.
Below, the original printed page, next to Big Finish's version. Can you spot the mistakes?
Above, one missing caption and three missing speech balloons on the very first page. Talk about careless? For a better comparison, click to enlarge.
Can you spot the missing caption on the above page? Below, a cover of Diana from 1967.
I would rather have scans of the original pages than new artwork with ommissions.
ReplyDeleteNo, it's the original artwork, JP, but some pages have missing lettering (because it's dropped off over the years) and some pages have new lettering. The original art will give better reproduction (which is why they didn't just scan the printed pages), but as they went to the bother of replacing OLD lettering, I'm not quite sure why they din't take the same care when replacing MISSING lettering.
ReplyDeleteHow odd. You would think they could just use the old photoshop to replace this missing captions.
ReplyDeleteI assume it's just carelessness on someone's part, PS. The fact that they replaced some lettering shows that they were prepared to restore the pages, so the pages where they failed to do so must just be an oversight. And such great art too.
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