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philcom55 wrote:
We had a giant version of one of those at art college in the 1970s. You had to climb inside it like a modern passport photo booth.
Yes, it was a very antiquated piece of kit.
philcom55 wrote:A cheaper alternative for copying magnified images, also advertised in American comic books, was a 'Heath Robinson' device known as a Pantograph. They always looked horribly awkward to me but I have heard of comic artists using them.
I used one of those once, somewhere. Probably at school. I think Nigel's explanation is the most credible though; that Leo simply drew a new version based on the old one.
Captain Storm wrote:...I wasn't referring to out and out copying line for line , brush stroke for brush stroke. Though of course in this regard , wasn't Maxwell Hawke artwork reused for the James Bold series in Cheeky Weekly albeit with edited artwork
regards,
The Cap.
Just to tidy up this loose end; 'Fangs of Fear', the first James Bold adventure to appear in Cheeky Weekly, re-utilised a script that had originally appeared as 'Maxwell Hawke in The House of a Thousand Secrets' in Buster from 29 October 1960 to 04 February 1961. However, from the evidence of the two examples of Maxwell Hawke art from this story that I have seen (thanks, Peter!) the James Bold art was entirely re-imagined, and not cribbed in any way from the earlier version.
Lew Stringer wrote:There was a machine called a Grant Enlarger which projected an image onto a lightbox for the artist to trace over. The size and clarity of the image could be adjusted by the use of handles and dials you turned. They certainly existed in the early 1980s so they may have been around in the mid-sixties.
We had a giant version of one of those at art college in the 1970s. You had to climb inside it like a modern passport photo booth. Used in conjunction with a Letraset catalogue it was really useful for trying out lettering styles in those pre-digital days, though I remember it got uncomfortably hot very quickly so that prolonged use inevitably resulted in a headache.
We had them at art college in the mid 1980s. Very useful. Computers were only just coming in as an art tool in college terms. I would imagine the majority of grant enlargers were obsolete by the late 1990s, unless one wanted to draw something for a retro look.
The square hatching in the goal nets is identical. And all of the characters are posed identically in each page. I'm not trying to exacerbate the debate i'm just interested in the machinations that transpired to produce these very similar pages. He must have had some sort of copy - perhaps just of the rough pencils. Leo knew Thomson kept his artwork so maybe he did effect copies one way or another.
I think that the deliberate similarities has just been a bit of harmless subversive naughtiness by Mr Baxendale, done for his own amusement. In fact, this has inspired me to 're-work' some of my own old drawings! [you can laugh, but I work as a paid cartoonist here and there, in fact I'm doing pro T-shirt designs right now].
If Mr Baxendale happened to read this thread I expect he would be chuckling about all this, as I am!
I would love a group of enthusiasts to assess my cartoon drawings decades after I drew them-------you can't get any higher level of flattery or compliment than that.
ISPYSHHHGUY wrote:I would love a group of enthusiasts to assess my cartoon drawings decades after I drew them-------you can't get any higher level of flattery or compliment than that.
That might well be true, Rab, if we were assessing their quality, but we are actually only focused on the similarity between the two strips, and, of course, the wider issues of how prevalent such repetition has been historically, and whether there are any circumstances in which it is justifiable. I am quite sure that the quality of Baxendale's work is marvelled at every day somewhere in the world.
The other day I was looking through my collection of VALIANT for suitable episodes of Challenge Charlie! to show in my series of blogposts dedicated to the 2012 Summer Olympics (you can view all 17 of them here: http://kazoop.blogspot.com/search/label ... h%20comics). I couldn’t help noticing that some instalments had more than a little in common with those of Dare-A-Day Davy from POW! Check today’s blogpost to view several “matching” pairs of the two strips side by side: http://kazoop.blogspot.com/2012/08/wher ... sh-go.html
Here is a taste:
There is at least one Commando where this has been done. It has not only been reprinted, but it has been cloned as well. I think the original script was either Operation Bulldog or Cannon at Corbon, but it has been twenty plus years and I would still need to find the clone issue to confirm!
I started to say something sensible but my parents took over my brain!
Earlier in this thread I said I was going to try and find more examples of remakes of Little Plum from the BEANO into Barmy Army in WHAM! and Minnie the Minx from the BEANO into Bad Penny in SMASH! by Leo Baxendale.
You can now view results of my search by checking out the two most recent posts in my blog: http://kazoop.blogspot.com/?zx=fc680f6f7041cfc5
I’ll do another post on this subject towards the end of the week.
