Brett’s Backstory

Kevin has decided to take Brett as his ward, and they set off together. Brett’s tragic backstory is revealed in these handsomely-printed and concisely-scripted comics. The impressive variety of settings, exotic locales, archery and wildlife were all hallmarks of Collins’ style.

ktb-022452-hf-150-qcc

ktb-030252-hf-150-qcc

In what must have been a rare case of transposed films, the Chicago Tribune’s March 9, 1952 comic printed badly. (It seems the magenta and cyan plates were switched — similar to a different instance, involving yellow and magenta). A tabloid version from the same day has its own reproduction issues, but gives an indication of how the colors were probably supposed to appear.

ktb-030952-ha-150-cst-qcc

ktb-030952-ta-150-qcc

While scrutinizing these comics more thoroughly, the third panel caught my eye, and not just for its printed variants.

ktb-030952-brett-running-qcc

Maybe just for me, but they seemed evocative of a certain other Superhero-ward duad.

batman-and-robin

Must be the capes.

2 thoughts on “Brett’s Backstory

  1. Hey, even when the Chi Trib got the color plates mixed up, their version still looks better. Enjoying this in-depth look into one of my favorite KTB sequences. This is really Kreigh Collins at his best–mature storytelling and evocative visuals. Yours, Gus the Great

    Liked by 1 person

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s