You don't REALLY want me to say anything about this isolated panel from DAISY AND DONALD # 12 (Gold Key Comics, Cover Date: September,1975), do you?
NAW, didn't think you did!
Don't blame me, I'm only a humble Blogger!
Instead, let's remember our writer / artist Bob Gregory and characters in happier times - like in the NEXT ISSUE!
Ah, that's MUCH BETTER!
6 comments:
…huh. Are we to infer, from the last sequence of panel, that Daisy was wearing a hat with a bow on it… on top her regular hair-bow? That's what I call committing to a style.
Achille:
I’d say you’d infer correctly!
Bob Gregory was a GREAT writer! Over the long haul, I’d even say he was one of Western’s best!
But he was a very uninspired artist, who should never have picked up a pencil! His character designs, his poses, and his layouts were “dull” at best – and “bad” at worst. Many a good story of his was “compromised”, if not outright ruined, by his inability to draw “convincing characters” and to tell his otherwise “good-to-great” stories!
To me, it’s been a toss-up as to who was the worse artist – Gregory or Kay Wright! (Or perhaps the “miscast” Lee Holley on Looney Tunes?) Wright, as everyone who reads this blog knows, was TERRIBLE (with a capital “T”), but at least he VARIED his panels more then Gregory! Of that entire ‘70s thru mid ‘80s crowd, I feel Jack Manning was far and away the best. Yes, his characters tended to be “angular” and off model, but his panels were varied, interesting, and actually fun to look at! His Mickey Mouse panels sorta went down a similar path to ‘70s Floyd Gottfredson!
Alas, this was the (perhaps self-inflicted) fate of Western Publishing once Disney raided their formerly-hearty artistic ranks to staff their Overseas Studio Program. But what boggles the mind to this day is why they couldn’t find or recruit better artists then these (and some of the lesser artists on the concurrent Warner Bros. and Walter Lantz titles) to carry on their tradition of the best animation-style art in the business! How hard, I will forever wonder, could it have been to do so, rather than present consistently inferior art such as this?
I suppose the question is not whether it was hard, but whether it was expensive…
Agreed on Jack Manning. One thing I've always liked about Manning is how fun and creative his one-off character designs always are, even walk-ons and other minor parts; he was almost never one for generic dognoses, the "random Beagle Boy without the mask" type — in the way that not just Gregory and Wright, but even someone like Tony Strobl, often allowed themselves to be.
Achille:
That’s exactly it about Jack Manning… His Mickey looked nothing like Paul Murry’s. His Scrooge looked nothing like Carl Barks’ or Tony Strobl’s. His Woody Woodpecker looked nothing like John Carey’s. And his Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote looked nothing like Phil DeLara’s or Pete Alvarado’s. …But they were FUN to Look at – especially when Manning inked himself, as in his one WDC&S Mickey Mouse serial, or in his early issues of Beep Beep the Road Runner!
I can’t buy the “expensive” theory when it comes to Western employing so many bad (or, at the very least, below average) artists at the time. With many young artists wanting to break into DC and Marvel, would there not also be some talented kid(s) who could draw Donald Duck properly – not like Kay Wright and Bob Gregory – and do it inexpensively in order to get the professional experience?
Western’s East Coast mystery and horror books of the time (Twilight Zone, Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery, Ripley’s Believe It or Not, etc.) had excellent art during the period. And, since most of those artists also worked concurrently on DC’s mystery and horror books, they probably didn’t come cheap.
Outside of some “sense of loyalty” that may have existed in Western’s West Coast offices at the time, I can’t imagine any reason for them continuing to settle for (so much) less.
Oh, and even when Tony Strobl did a “generic dogface”, it still looked world’s better than Wright or Gregory!
My biggest issue with the top panel is that even though several characters are posed in ways that suggest movement--the cop bending down, the crook bending up, Donald recovering--the picture is extremely static. There is no movement nor sense of movement. The figures are frozen in a still frame of time like the figures on Keats' Grecian Urn. The picture gives no feeling that the cop will ever get up with the nabbed crook in hand, nor will Donald ever shake himself free of his grogginess. And what is with Daisy all in shadow and likewise still as a statue?
This artist tends to give policemen a very amused expression when they are carrying out their duty. He also tends to drain the story of whatever urgency may be implicit in the dialogue, by making characters look like what they are doing is really no big deal. The facial expressions are very limited and seem not to get too agitated in either direction. Characters are either sort of happy or sort of sad.
I would also be interested to know where that horse-hat trope came from. Disney has used it a lot--it serves as the finale to "Johnny Fedora and Alice Blue Bonnet". But where did the idea come from of putting human (or, in Daisy's case duck) hats on horses? In fact, now that horses are rarely employed on city streets, the whole notion of an urban horse is somewhat anachronistic today. Anyway, I'm glad Daisy was happy with her solution--but the happiness appears to be quite mild. As I mentioned, the extreme highs and lows do not seem to be there--unlike as with Barks, who could wring pathos out of Donald's troubled conscience in "Luck of the North."
Scarecrow:
What you so perfectly describe in your first two panels is Bob Gregory’s art in a nutshell! [Cue Groucho Marx] “…And that’s exactly where it should be… in a nutshell!”
As truly bad as Kay Wright’s artwork was, at least it wasn’t this stultifying-ly static! Again, the real crime is that Gregory’s stories were GOOD – but they were a lot better when Tony Strobl drew them!
I have no idea where the “horse-hat trope” came from, but it seemed like a “Turn of the [19th to 20th] Century” thing. Maybe it helped keep the flies off?
Consider THIS COVER, then imagine what it would look like if Carl Barks, Tony Strobl, Don Rosa, William Van Horn, Pat Block, Vicar, Daniel Branca, the Heymans Bros., Dann Jippes, Fred Milton, Romano Scarpa, Luciano Bottaro, Giovan Batista Carpi, (and the list goes on and on) drew it!
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