Thursday, January 31, 2008

Would you like your Man-Thing Giant-Size or small and pink...?


If there’s one thing guaranteed to induce involuntary fanboy giggles of a certain pitch it’s the phrase Giant-Size Man-Thing.

Yaffa were adamantly having none of that. Their Man-Thing issue (reprinting #’s 4-6 of the 1974 series) was titled Swamp Creature (all uncanny references to Swamp Thing be damned!).

And it was digest-sized.

Ha! Mock-proof!

But it makes me giggle anyway.

PS Not sure what to make of the shocking pink palette, nor the decision to ‘correct’ the reflected headlights and impact flash of the original cover… maybe they were working off black and white copies of the cover…?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I'm going to put aside the temption to add to the endless list of double entendres...(crisis of infinate entrendres?)

... and comment about the colours.

I have a theory, some of which involves knowing a bit about colour printing processes of the time, and parlty requiring an assumption that the person who did the colouring on this cover was only passingly competant (I'm being polite).

While some covers appear to have arrived in Australia with full colour information, most seem to have arrived with little and some with none at all. There's a few KGMs with strikingly different colour schemes.

It seems most likely that most cover art arrived in the format of black and white artwork, with colour mark-ups. This would give an indication of what should be what colour, but not full separations.

So if the US cover artist tried special things, such as the lighting flare, that weren't on the mark ups, Australian cover colourists probably know nothing about them. Ot the skill or press requirements to achieve it might be beyond them.

It also points out a possibility for that "pink" background.

The colour scheme used for the mark ups was probably is "CMYK" - Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black (K), with other colours indicated by a percentage of each. The basic "red" in this scheme is Magenta, with proper mixing of the colours required to get something more like red.

This cover looks a little too magenta to me -- perhaps someone failing to get a red sky, and not even trying the cloud effects on the original.