Excerpt from What Paper? The Printing Aficionado Magazine, Issue 15, Volume XXIV, 2015

Review of the printing of the Dover edition of The Puma Blues (by Stephen Murphy and Michael Zulli) printed by RR Donnelley in China. Paper stock unknown.

When Dover announced a collected edition of the 80s series The Puma Blues, we here at What Paper? anxiously examined the press release for phrases like “shot from the original artwork” or “shot from the original negatives” or even “restored”.

We couldn’t find any of those phrases, which usually means “we’ve scanned in a copy that the local library had available and then sent that to the printer”.

Would our fears turn out to be justified?

Above we see a panel from the new Dover edition. It’s printed on shiny, white, almost sarcastically heavy paper: When turning a page, it feels like you’re turning more than a single page, so you flip the page back again and confirm that you’ve only turned one page.

The lines seem crisp, but it looks like there’s been a lot of ink gain. The smudged zip-a-tone looks rather dirty.

Here’s that panel from the original issue two. The linework looks virtually identical: There’s not a single line in the new edition that wasn’t already on the printed page originally. The tone is less smudged here than in the new edition.

Severe ink gain on black background in the new edition above…

… and identical growth in the original comic book. The Dover edition looks like they’ve scanned the comic book and then run the results through a “sharpen” filter.

But the blacks look nicer and heavier, due to the non-absorbent smooth paper.

Another example where it seems like lines surely are coarser than they were drawn…

… and they’re identical to the version printed in issue four.

Zulli uses a lot of tone, and fortunately there’s no moire effects in the Dover edition (which is a thing that plagues new editions of old comics). However, it frequently looks rather ugly and smudged.

Here’s the original from issue four, which is also smudged, but isn’t dirty to the same extent.

The new artwork from the brief added conclusion to the book suffers no reproduction issues: It’s clear and even.

Of course, it’s mostly text (with computer lettering), so reproduction isn’t that difficult.

The binding is very tight: You have to really work at it to hold this massive tome open, and since the paper is so shiny, you have to move the book around a lot to be able to read it.

What Paper? Rating: Parchment.

FF1989: Kafka: The Execution

Kafka: The Execution by Leopoldo Durañona.

Fantagraphics were publishing fellow South Americans Muñoz & Sampaya in a similar format to this (magazine size with cardboard covers) at the time (as well as anthologising Francisco Solano Lopez). I’m not familiar with Durañona’s work, but this is kinda interesting.

The artwork is a bit reminiscent of Moebius.

These are, of course, adaptations of Kafka short stories, and they’re done inventively, but respectfully, I think. It’s been so long since I’ve read these short stories that I can’t really tell how faithful adaptations they are, but they work on their own just fine.

Durañona is perhaps most famous for his work in various Warren horror magazine, but is still working in comics today, most recently doing an Indiana Jones series for Dark Horse.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

FF1989: The Eye of Mongombo

The Eye of Mongombo #1-7 by Doug Gray.

Before this series, Doug Gray had a couple of appearances in Critters, I think.

The Eye of Mongombo is a pretty funny comic book about that archaeologist up there (transformed into a duck) who looks for a treasure in South America. Hijinx ensue. A lot.

I find myself without a lot to say about this book. I didn’t read it back then, so this is my first time reading it. It’s fine, I guess? It’s consistently amusing, but somehow it just didn’t quite connect with me. Perhaps the slightly basic artwork has something to do with it…

There’s a few backup stories starring the artist himself.

Hm, I’ve been meaning to mention that I kinda like these Fantagraphics house ads, and perhaps this is the right place to twaddle on about it for a bit.

I think looking at a cover of a comic book is a pretty useless way of determining whether I want to read something or not. Which is why it’s so frustrating that so many ads and shopping web sites only display the cover and none of the interiors.

I can take a half second look at a page and see whether it appeals to me; whether it’s something that will be enjoyable to spend some time with. At least on a page-by-page basis. I won’t have any idea whether the story is stupid or not.

But looking at a cover tells me nothing. Some people who do great covers do lousy storytelling and vice versa. Even people who do astounding pages (like, say, Carl Barks) can do “just good” covers (perhaps because his covers were due a lot more editorial scrutiny than his stories)?

Somebody who does this right is Spit and a Half. John Porcellino shows us a couple of pages from each book, and that makes it such a joy to shop from him. I’ll just open a gazillion tab with books from his catalogue, and *click page* *stare a millisecond* *click buy* (or not) *close tab*. It’s just perfect. And I don’t understand why other web sites don’t follow that format.

Anyway, back to Mongombo…

The Eye of Mongombo was apparently nominated for a Harvey award? It didn’t win.

This series was announced to be lasting ten issues, but no further issues were published after number seven. It didn’t mention that it was the last one.

And I think the storyline had stalled slightly. I mean, it’s a parody adventure, but having the storyline advance a bit would be nice. Instead we spend one whole issue in a hallucination, and then a lot of new characters, like this bunny narrator, are introduced.

But it seems to be a comic book that is fondly remembered: It pops up in surveys like this now and again.

Doug Gray doesn’t seem to have published any comic books after this one was cancelled, although he was writing for Duck Tales for a while. He seems to have been working mostly as an animator, which is a natural progression from Mongombo.

This post is part of the Fantagraphics Floppies series.

On a Roll

I bought these comics by CF a few months back, but they, er, rolled behind a stack of comics, so I forgot about them until tonight.

They’re printed on thermal receipt paper, so they’re monochromatic, but CF has customized them a bit with various stamps at the start and end of each roll.

Winding them back up after reading reminded me of helping my father go through receipt rolls in my childhood. (He had a store.) It didn’t happen a lot, but sometimes you had to chase down big errors, and the only way to do that would be to unwind the roll, looking for that (apparent) 3,000,000 sale…

… and then re-roll it all.

The contents of these rolls are a lot more aesthetically satisfying, though.

You gotta love CF. And the fourth volume of the amazing Powr Mastrs is finally being published in 2017. I’m looking forward to that…