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| Characters copyright HANNA-BARBERA |
25 years ago, a MARVEL U.K. editor asked me to letter a Holiday Special at short notice. I agreed, but when I received the script and art, the script was awful. It had been translated from a foreign edition (which was a translation from a U.S. edition) and the script was so immensely bad as to be insulting.
It was a HANNA-BARBERA-based cartoon comic, and almost nothing about the scripts was right. RANGER SMITH was named WARDEN SMITH, PICNIC BASKETS were called LUNCHEON HAMPERS, and the characters spoke in a stilted fashion, merely repeating, in the main, what was obvious in the pictures. What's more, little care had been taken to ensure the dialogue and captions fitted the allocated space. It was a dog's dinner.
I 'phoned the editor and related my concerns, and enquired if I might be allowed to 'punch' things up a bit. She reluctantly assented, seeing the wisdom in my words, but she wasn't overly happy that I'd spotted oversights she had missed. However, the deadline was looming and there wasn't time to return the strips to the office to be lettered by anyone else.
You'll have to trust me on this, I suppose, but the finished result was far better than the original version. I tailored all the dialogue to fit the balloons, I supplied the characters' logos for the splash pages (taken from a Hanna-Barbera book I had), and actually added some much-needed humour to the script.
The tale you see is one of the results. If you get at least one chuckle out of it, that's one more than was in it before I got to work. Did I get any more dosh for all the extra time and effort I put into it? Hey, don't ask silly questions.
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(Incidentally, I suspect that 'parsley' should have been rendered as 'celery', but that didn't occur to me until after I'd turned the job in. It's just that I know people munch on celery to curb their appetite and lose weight, but I've never heard of anyone advised to eat parsley to do so. It would probably work, but celery is the usual recommendation.)
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| It seems the original notion was to have Yogi borrow a dress from within the tent, but as I received b&w stats to letter, I assumed it was the tent he was wearing and lettered it accordingly. However, the strip was coloured after I'd lettered it (as the open case ltg on page 1 being coloured shows), so Yogi's wraparound should have been coloured to match the dialogue. As it is, my idea of 'a bear in a tent' has been compromised |
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| Note that Yogi's borrowed tunic disappears in panel 2 |
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| Incidentally, all the balloon and caption shapes were already on the art, so I had to fit my lettering within pre-existing outlines |
And below is the cover which contained the above tale.
