sunday comics

New Year/Old Gear

After acquiring my first comics — a two-year run of “Kevin the Bold” — I decided I should publish a book somehow. First, I needed to figure out the best way to get images of them, and since they were too large for my present scanner, I thought of using a camera stand. I had a vague notion of what one would look like, so I jury-rigged one out of some dowels and thin pieces of pine. 

Camera Stand

It held my camera, a Canon PowerShot A40. The camera wasn’t very sleek, but a grip that bumped out on its side helped secure it onto the camera stand. It was March, 2004, so shooting indoors made sense.

A40

Being a bit of a packrat, I still had some old light scoops and 3200K bulbs that dated back to college. I plugged them in by my camera stand and my ersatz photo studio seemed set. However, the resulting photos left much to be desired — my lighting was terrible!

KTB 010955 inside photo

I decided to try shooting outside; I figured the natural light would be perfect. It was now May, so going outside wasn’t out of the question. The light was ideal, but even a light breeze complicated everything.

KTB 020556 outside photo

Needless to say, I didn’t have a photo assistant. I could use weights to hold the comics in place, but having to deal with all these moving parts for each shot was less than ideal. It was a very slow, nerve-racking process — one gust and everything would be all over the back yard. Eventually I decided that shooting indoors on a sunny day near large windows was the most workable solution.

One way to say it would be that I didn’t know what I was doing; I prefer to think I was making it up as I went along. Regardless, it’s not the most confident way to start an endeavor, but I thought the most important thing was to just get started. I settled on using three 75-watt bulbs, my camera’s flash and the necessary color corrections in PhotoShop.

I shot my 105 comics, and proceeded to photograph new additions the same way, using a SanDisk card reader to  upload the images to my iMac. My collection grew slowly, which was just as well, since the process was so time-consuming. I recalled vaguely that higher-end cameras had lenses with optics that produced images whose edges were square but the A40 was obviously not in that category. So I also used PhotoShop to square up the images. But again, what a slow process.

Card Reader

A guy who worked at a place where I freelanced knew how to use the company’s tabloid-sized  photocopier as a scanner, and this seemed promising, but I wasn’t able to get permission to take advantage of this piece of equipment. As my comics collection grew, I become familiar with eBay, and I started looking into inexpensive tabloid scanners. Eventually I won an auction for a Microtek ScanMaker 9800XL. It makes nice square scans and easily accommodates half-page comics on its 12″ x 17″ bed. Lighting and wind are no longer problems. Even with its ultra-slow scanning speed, the $200 investment was well worth it. And it’s much more civilized than the old camera-stand process. The scanner is probably 15 years old but it still works fine (though I’ve had to purchase third-party software drivers to keep it functioning with the ever-changing Mac operating systems. I recommend VueScan from Hamrick software).

9800XL

At this point, I have most of my comics scanned (duplicating my attempts with the camera stand). Color-correction lags way behind, though I have nearly worked my way through the 100 “Mitzi McCoys” extant. And with any luck, a Mitzi McCoy book will be published in 2016.

Happy New Year!

Bad Hair Day

Some Sunday comic sections were known for their high-quality coloring jobs, others less so. But no matter where they appeared, comics were reproduced using the standard four-color process: cyan-magenta-yellow-black. I doubt the Florida Times-Union won many awards for color reproduction, as this comic from early 1955 makes clear. The yellow and cyan plates were switched, resulting in bizarre colors, most notably in Brett’s blond hair — check out the ’do in the throwaway panel! The foliage was relatively unaffected, being comprised up of both cyan and yellow, but anything colored primarily in tints of yellow (hair) or cyan (armor) had a pretty undesirable appearance (not to mention those skin tones).

KTB 011655 HF 300 x QCC

KTB 011655 HF 300 cc

Merry Christmas and a Good 1969

KTC xmas 68 200

1968 was filled with change. After appearing for 19 years, “Kevin the Bold” ended its run. At the age of 61, Kreigh Collins launched his third comic strip, “Up Anchor.” This fresh start was the big news in the holiday letter Kreigh and Teddy sent out that December. There were also family updates , typical New Year’s optimism, and a dose of Kreigh’s wit.

“Up Anchor” ran until early 1972, and after its 174 episodes, Collins retired. All told, Kreigh’s comics appeared for 25 years, spanning four decades — over 1,200 Sundays.

UA envelope 72

Toppers

In comic strip parlance, a topper is a small secondary strip seen along with a larger Sunday strip. These strips usually were positioned at the top of the page, but they sometimes ran beneath the main strip, as in “Water Lore,” Kreigh Collins’s topper for his third and final comic, “Up Anchor.”

UA 081069 OA 72

Times were changing in the 1960s — in the comic strip business, they were changing too, as space for comics continued to shrink. Fewer and fewer papers printed half-page comics, and Collins was frustrated by the way his artwork was cropped in order to squeeze into the smaller third-page format. When his new comic launched, he drew it as a one-third pager, and used the topper to fill out the half-page of space. If a paper ran it as a third, the topper was lost. Printed half-page versions of “Up Anchor” are very rare, so these days, the most likely place to see the “Water Lore” topper is on examples of the original artwork. 

UA WL 022270 OA 100February 2, 1970
UA WL 091370 BWS 100 qccSeptember 13, 1970
UA WL 092070 BWS 100 qccSeptember 20, 1970
UA WL 100371 BWS 100October 3, 1971
UA WL 102471 BWS 100October 24, 1971
UA WL 103171 BWS 100 qccOctober 31, 1971
UA WL 110771 BWS 100 qccNovember 7, 1971
UA WL 111471 OA 100November 14, 1971
UA WL 112170 BWS 100 qccNovember 21, 1971
UA WL 121971 OA 100December 19, 1971

Metamorphosis 2 — More Time Travel

In the final episode of “Kevin the Bold,” after saving yet another damsel in distress (and of course, an entire village), our hero is begged by a lovely señorita to settle down and stay in her now-peaceful valley. Kevin, whose last name (Marlin) has been revealed in a recent, prior episode, declines the offer from the Spanish beauty but admits he could imagine himself settling down on a boat in say, 300 years.

KTB 102768 Th 100 qcc

Abruptly, “Up Anchor” was launched a week later (November 3, 1968). As the NEA’s promotional literature put it, “Kreigh Collins’ credentials to create and draw ‘Up Anchor,’ America’s first color comic strip devoted to boating, are as bona fide as the burr on a thistle.” Narrated by first mate Jane Marlin, “Up Anchor” was based on experiences Collins had with his family cruising on his own sailboat. Aboard Heather with Jane were her husband (Kevin Marlin, remember him?), and sons Erik and Dave. The scripts were developed in partnership with Collins’ wife Theresa (“Teddy”), who had previously chronicled the family’s round-trip journey from their home port on Lake Michigan to Maine (Teddy’s “The Wake of the Heather” was published in 1967) .

UA 110368 Th 100 qcc

Metamorphosis 1 — By Popular Demand

Editor & Publisher, a newspaper industry trade magazine, announced in its August 26, 1950 issue that “Mitzi McCoy” was about to be taken over by a new character. According to NEA feature director Ernest “East” Lynn, jumping back nearly five centuries to this new lead character was without precedent in the comic business. With the comic strip’s new setting, Collins returned to the field in which he made an international reputation — the field of costume illustration.

E&P quoted Lynn, “It was the outgrowth of popular approval of two episodes in Mitzi McCoy, each of which gave the artist an opportunity to display his great flair for period art. The first was a story dealing with the history of the Irish wolfhound. The second, ‘The Christmas Story,’ told the story of the birth of Christ. In each instance Mr. Collins used the device of having Stub Goodman, one of the leading characters of Mitzi McCoy, narrate the story to a young boy, Dick Dixon. And in each instance fan mail greatly increased. Several editors urged period illustration on a regular basis.”

A month after the announcement, the final episode of “Mitzi” ran, the tale of the McCoy family legend.

MM 092450 OA 100 cc

The following Sunday (October 1, 1950), the action continued, but under a new shingle. It began with Kevin saving Mitzi’s ancestress, Moya McCoy. However, the focus soon shifted as Kevin left Moya (and Mitzi) behind. As penance for a wild youth, Kevin had pledged a fight against oppression wherever he found it. He waged his battle for the next eighteen years in the funny papers, until another major plot change occurred.

MM 100150 72 cc

Tom Match and Stub

Tom Match and Stub 150

This undated one-off comic, found in the archives of the Grand Rapids Public Library’s local history department, appears to pre-date “Mitzi McCoy.” After taking notice of Kreigh’s “Bible Stories Comics,” the Newspaper Enterprise Association (NEA) began pursuing Collins to develop a comic, and “Tom Match and Stub” is likely an early draft of a proposed strip.

This early comic was set in Fishtown (Collins often spent summers painting in nearby Leland, Mich.); most of the action in “Mitzi” occurred in the fictional “picturesque little town of Freedom,” which was also situated in Michigan. Like “Mitzi,” “Tom Match and Stub” is set in a newsroom, only the roles are reversed — here Stub works for young Tom, whereas Stub is Tim’s boss in the syndicated version. Stub is clearly Stub, Tom resembles Tim, but the Match character doesn’t resemble Mitzi.

 MM Stub Stub TomTimMatchMoya McCoy KrgbHowever, she does bear a resemblance to an ancestor of Mitzi’s, but that’s jumping ahead (or is it jumping back?).