...Or, "Doubled Ducks", if you will!
Proving once again that "No Good Deed Goes Unpunished", we present the covers of SCAMP #31 (Gold Key Comics, Cover Date: September, 1976) and SCAMP #33 (Gold Key Comics, Cover Date: February, 1977).
Ya try to be nice to some cute little ducks, an' let 'em swim and frolic in your doggie water bowl...
An', TWO ISSUES LATER, they bring their friends, an' take over th' joint!
Won't be long before Scamp's spittin'-out wet feathers! P'TOOEY!
DUCKS! Give 'em an INCH, an' they'll take the WHOLE BACK YARD!
Or, to paraphrase the great W.C. Fields...
Never Give a DUCKer an Even Break!
4 comments:
The second cover looks like the work of Al Hubbard, but the first one is harder to place. Bob Gregory or Kay Wright, maybe?
Welllll, Deb… You could always check GCD and find out… :-)
RIGHT HERE!
I know the credits are there, ‘cause I put ‘em there myself!
It’s all one great big continuum… Get the book from an online retailer, read the book, index the book at GCD (or correct or fill-in missing information), and work it into a Blog post! Now THAT’S synergy!
…And, of course the other cover is by Al Hubbard, the very best Scamp artist of all… and so miscast on all those “Donald and Fethry” things, alas.
Same character, subtle differences. Even the situation is very similar. Not sure I can say one is "wrong" and one is "right," but there's an assurance in Al Hubbard's work, a kind of authenticity, when it comes to the characters he drew best. Although Pete is no slouch, and his work has its own merits. Some of his work seems a little "rushed" to me, but that could be my personal quibble. He, like Hubbard, is someone I look on as a cherished friend. Both covers are good, but the one by Al just seems the more polished of the two.
I'm glad you say he was "miscast" on the Donald and Fethry stories--of which I had no idea there were so many until the Disney Masters series came along. Somehow Al had a knack for depicting the feature characters more than the shorts characters. His work on Scamp is stellar, and as I mentioned, has a sense of authenticity about it. I also feel he did a marvelous job with the Peter Pan characters, as well as O'Malley and the Alley Cats and Robin Hood (where once again he seems to have eclipsed dear Pete; Al's Robin Hood books have a more definitive look about them, though Pete's artwork of course is fun). Hubbard's Woodsy Owl comics are also very well-drawn.
In Al's hands, however, Mickey appears more boyish whereas he tends to make Minnie look older and more mature. Goofy has more substance and weight, while Donald appears in some scenes as though about to take wing and fly. While his interpretations of these classic characters has charm, they feel slightly off-model. Not bad at all, but just kind of different. Whereas characters from the feature films, particularly Scamp, Tinker Bell, Jiminy Cricket, and Peter Pan seem entirely correct and spot-on in their appearance.
I will add that, much as I enjoyed the Scamp title as a kid, I did feel that the constant Dell reprints of Hubbard's work had gotten somewhat monotonous. So when fresh artists began applying new stories and art to the Scamp comics, I was at first in favor. But only at first. I didn't end up collecting many of the "new" Scamp issues. The stories and artwork didn't grab me the way the earlier ones did, and I realized that I appreciated Hubbard's work (not knowing who he was at the time) more than I had thought.
Scarecrow:
Nobody is truly “wrong” except maybe:
Kay Wright, who was low-level in his early ‘60s work, and absolutely horrible in his 1969-1984 work.
Bob Gregory, a great writer but a bland and unimaginative artist, who should have stayed at his typewriter and never picked up a pencil.
And other woefully “miscast” artists, who were otherwise good but utterly unsuitable for certain properties, such as Frank Johnson on Huckleberry Hound and Lee Holley on Looney Tunes. I have a planned, but not yet written, post on “revisiting Frank Johnson” that I hope to publish in the near future… again, I hope…
Pete Alvarado is a sadly underappreciated artist whose best work was on Hanna-Barbera properties (especially), and Looney Tunes features like Tweety and Sylvester and Beep-Beep the Road Runner. His Disney character work tends to be lower-tier, perhaps accounting for his lack of due recognition. And, of course, you can see his credits many times in Warner Bros. cartoons.
Al Hubbard was one of the greatest artists of the Western stable, I daresay along with Carl Barks and Harvey Eisenberg, but the best of his work was never prominently displayed among titles that readers and fans who “make” such reputations tend to gravitate toward.
Just as no one will ever draw Uncle Scrooge as well as Carl Barks (though some DO come close), and no one will ever draw Tom and Jerry or The Flintstones as well as Harvey Eisenberg, no one will ever draw Scamp and the many distinctive dogs and cats that inhabit his world as well as Al Hubbard.
As you say, he was “stellar” on Scamp, Jiminy Cricket, Peter Pan, etc. but Disney comic book artists’ reputations are made on Uncle Scrooge, Donald Duck, and Mickey Mouse, and it is there that Hubbard was “miscast” and, because of that, falls short.
His work on those characters was nowhere near as good (or as on-model and “accurate”) as that of Carl Barks, Paul Murry, Tony Strobl and a host of European artists far too numerous to mention in this limited space.
It is unfortunate that Hubbard later gravitated toward the Disney Studio Program (S-Code), that “round-pegged-square-holed” him into all those Donald and Fethry things, where Tony Strobl or Jack Bradbury (who also jumped to the better-paying Studio Program – until Disney eventually kicked all of them to the curb in favor of the lower-cost [and lower-quality] Jaime Dias Studio) would have been perfectly suitable.
But, we have lots of great Al Hubbard artwork to enjoy on characters he did better than any other Western artist… and aren’t we glad for that!
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