Comic Cuts - 25 November 2011

This week's progress report on the C. L. Doughty collection has - unlike last week - some progress to report! I spent all weekend and Monday on completing the artwork clean-up and relettering of three of the strips, so I now have 65 pages finished, subject to proofing. The fourth strip is scanned but the pages are so huge I had to do each one in four parts which need to be pieced together like a jigsaw before I can begin doing the clean up. But it's worth the effort, as you can see from the picture above.

Actually, the picture (much reduced and compressed to make uploading it from my end and viewing it from your end much easier and quicker) doesn't do the original artwork justice. The boards are enormous - around 62 ½ by 52 ¼ cm or 24 ½ by 20 ½ inches. They're drawn "twice up" which is actually four times the area of the printed page as it appeared in Look and Learn. I have never been a collector of original artwork, which has always been way beyond my earnings, but I can understand why people want to have originals hanging on their wall. The pages I've seen from Doughty these past few months have certainly given me a greater appreciation for his talent and, I'm sorry to say, a lower opinion of the quality of printing of British comics.

If the effort I'm putting into making the artwork look good is reflected in the finished book, I can say with confidence that it will look fantastic.

Random scans. Two more from the cache of SF novels picked up recently. The two Fred Saberhagen books form a rather odd panorama — normally you will see books creating panoramas when placed side by side but these two are top and bottom of a larger pic by Peter Jones.

Next week... I'm not 100% sure. I may have a strip or I may continue with my trek through World of Wonder. Depends on how I feel on Sunday after we've chopped back some more of the hedge - or, rather, the tangle that purports to be a hedge. Life would be so much easier if it was just books and comics...