"Letter to Santa" is a 24-page story written and drawn by Carl Barks for Western Publishing in 1949, first published in Dell's Christmas Parade 1, November 1949, and reprinted twice during Gladstone's run, first in Christmas Parade 2 (1989) and then in Donald Duck Adventures 11 (Carl Barks Library in Color album series) in November 1994. For the 1989 version, we marked up pages from a beat-up copy of the Dell CP as color guides. For DDA Album 11, I did new guides for digital separation, taking advantage of fades and blends, but don't think I got too crazy with the color. I mainly tried to complement the great art in this classic story.
Bruce Hamilton, Gladstone's publisher/owner, laid out all the CBL in Color album covers. It was his decision to create cover art for each book from panels and figures in the stories*, in large part as a money-saver (no new cover art to commission) but also to avoid using Barks cover reprints, already in heavy use for the comics -- and not always available for the original issues his stories appeared in. Since Bruce was a night owl, we would come into work some mornings to find the floor near the copier machine ankle deep in rejected copies covered with bits and bobs of Barks panels at various sizes, and his highly-annotated final layouts sitting on John's or Gary's desk.
This cover was one of his more successful layouts. It took advantage of a rare full-page splash panel, so very little enlargement was needed, and the stat we had was clean and sharp. The only retouch needed for the cover was to replace the logo, title box and wreath-encircled caption with art to match the background, something John Clark was especially adept at.
(Since the cover and page one of the story were practically identical, I just added the necessary info to the cover color guide sent to Jamison.)
"Letter to Santa" is one of Carl Barks' best-remembered stories, Christmas or otherwise. It was also a particularly fun story to color, what with steam-shovels dueling in the streets of Duckburg and a pair of impostor Santas getting run through the wringer by the frantic Huey, Dewey and Louie (who perfectly embody the sense of anxious tension I remember so well from childhood Christmases).
Here are my color guides for the first ten pages (page one above). I apologize for the spotty quality of these images; our scanner is giving up the ghost in fits and starts, creating lots of shadows and doing a lousy job of descreening among other idiosyncrasies.
*Bruce's theory was that Carl's art was so well-drawn that it could be enlarged to any size without needing any retouching. If we'd been working from originals, that may have been the case. But we had photostats of varying quality to work with, and take it from me, there was a lot of art retouching on those album covers, especially when a 1-inch duck had to go up 800% or more.
All images © Disney.
0 Yorumlar