I bought this bit of artwork for a fiver in a charity shop knowing it is the three bears. It is on a slightly larger thick board. I know it is part of the production run of the strip but I would like some more information about the artist, who I assume is Bob McGrath, and the date and issue if possible of the strip. Thanks guys.
Briliant bargain, Ed! Well done--I agree with Shiner in that it doesn't look like it has been done for the weekly Beano---maybe a Summer Special which were coloured differently.
I'm really sorry to say it, but this looks like a fake to me. It looks like a very careful copy of a Bob McGrath page but the linework looks off. The clincher is the hand drawn lettering, imitating the typeface used in The Beano at the time.
Going by the foxing it must have been done quite a long time ago though.
What do others think? Any Beano staff still on this forum?
In my youth I used to copy whole pages of comic strips so it isn't uncommon. I wouldn't have been able to reproduce the masthead so well though. How would that have been done?
stevezodiac wrote:In my youth I used to copy whole pages of comic strips so it isn't uncommon. I wouldn't have been able to reproduce the masthead so well though. How would that have been done?
Very carefully with the looks of things. On a genuine page the logo would be pasted on, as would the speech balloons, but that looks like it's part of the artwork.
I had considered that it might be by Bob but perhaps a rushed job or perhaps he was ill, but that's doing him a disservice. It looks very much like someone has copied the whole page, lettering and all. Perhaps they wrongly thought that was the way to submit art samples to DCT?
It's very good for what it is, Ed: even if this is an amateur work ---and I am still not 100 per cent certain on this, either way, as are other equally seasoned comics enthusiasts------you got a good deal considering what you paid out for this-----this strip is certainly good enough to publish, even if scrutiny reveals it is perhaps a very good approximation of the famous strip.
I can say with certainty that it isn't an annual page, because the Beano and Dandy books used exclusively rotating spot colours throughout the books until the late 80s or early 90s - some pages red, some yellow, some green, some blue, some orange etc. Also, an annual strip would have been printed over more than one page with larger frames.
It's possibly a summer special page, although I think I agree that it's a ghost job by someone impersonating Bob and then colouring it by hand. The Beano started using letraset in I think the early 70s, Summer Specials have always tended to use custom strip mastheads, and this is the critical thing - I think even full colour Summer Special pages were coloured in house at the time.
I stand to be corrected of course, but enjoy it for what it is.
I also think it is a copy. A very good one but a copy nonetheless.
My reasoning is that the balloons have been drawn on when they would be stuck on by the DCT staff. The masthead would have been pasted on as well. The style of the bears is also just a touch "off". And to me, the most important reason, is that there are no editorial comments in the margins.
Also, if it was the original, there would be a stamp on the back to indicate the comic, the date of publication and ancillary information such as when it was received by the company from the artist.
Has anyone been able to find out when the story was published yet?
I started to say something sensible but my parents took over my brain!
The Summer Specials sometimes used unknown artists to do 'fill-in' strips in the late 60s/early 70s, ---I found some anonymous-looking Biffo strips on there just recently---so I will have a look through these again, as it is not an impossible route---although as Lew says, this doesn't explain the lettering done on the same level, or the same-scale logo heading---the annuals and Summer Specials still used the shrunken-down, seperately-produced intro logos we got in the weekly comics.
I remember DCT repeating a Charlie Grigg Desperarte Dan strip for one of the Summer Specials, that had the [obviously existant originally] word balloons long missing, but they still reprinted it as a curio.
When Ken Reid was having health problems in the early 1960's he could only do pencil layouts for quite a while and these were inked and coloured by other artists, sometimes trialists. Most obvious are in the Jonah and Ali Ha Ha strips. A couple were done by Mike Barrett whose work can't be hidden, but most were by junior staff and stick out like a sore thumb. Maybe Bob was unwell and just did the layouts for this? and the proof of the pudding so to speak would be in whether or not it was published?
bigpete wrote:When Ken Reid was having health problems in the early 1960's he could only do pencil layouts for quite a while and these were inked and coloured by other artists, sometimes trialists. Most obvious are in the Jonah and Ali Ha Ha strips. A couple were done by Mike Barrett whose work can't be hidden, but most were by junior staff and stick out like a sore thumb.
It's good to have this clarified. I've always thought Mike Barrett had some input in some of those strips.
bigpete wrote:Maybe Bob was unwell and just did the layouts for this? and the proof of the pudding so to speak would be in whether or not it was published?
Possibly, but it still wouldn't explain why it's hand lettered (imitating the typset used at the time) or why it's been coloured (and so weakly), - unless the guy doing the trial wrongly thought he had to do that.
On a genuine page the logo would be pasted on, as would the speech balloons, but that looks like it's part of the artwork. 
