Melbourne's a great city to pick up cheap reading. Here's a few recent comic gems I've found at markets, second hand bookshops and opportunity shops. All costing one or two clams apiece.
Shaky Kane! From freebie box at my LCS.
Sometimes it's nice to dip into some juvenile DC Thomson comics, although the IPC titles were always a preference as a kid.
Not a comic, but every now and then I like to pull a book of letters from an author I dig out of the Pikitia Press library and read a few. Published in 2001, this volume retailed for 90 coconuts! I picked it up from the Bookhouse for 4 clams. The Bookhouse man mentioned in those days book retailers could charge that much for a book and folk would fill their houses with them. Now he finds folk offering him shelves of them and for him they're virtually unsellable. Holy Smokes! 90 Coconuts!!
The Lion Summer Spectacular Epic Holiday Special featured comic and prose adaptions of films from the late sixties. Batman, James Bond: You Only Live Twice, Thunderbirds, and more were featured along with an Oliver Passingham (1925-2003) adaption of the Arthur Hiller film, TOBRUK. Passingham's career started on newspaper strips such as Lesley Shane, Rick Martin, Jane Fortune and Sally Marsh during the fifties. Reprints of his Lesley Shane newspaper strips by Amalgamated Press led to work on Rick Random, School Friend and other Amalgamated titles. In the sixties Passingham commenced work with DC Thomson where he would freelance for a further 33 years. During the seventies Passingham traveled, living in the Canaries, on the French Riviera, Monte Carlo and a year in Sydney, Australia during 1980, eventually returning to London in 1990. During this time he continued producing work for DC Thomson until his retirement in 1993.
Click for larger view
The original board of the first page of Passingham's TOBRUK adaption is comprised of a photostat reproduction of the Tobruk movie poster as a header, a moody night scene depicted in inky washes, and two panels showing frogmen sabotaging a french freighter, depicted with ink line drawings and white paint highlights. Upon examining the art-board I found Passingham had originally depicted the entire scene in washes as shown below with the bottom two panels still visible under the pasted on replacement.
Click for larger view
My presumption for the redrawn panels is that Passingham may have been compelled by editorial to redraw the characters to resemble their movie counterparts. He certainly nails the likeness of star George Peppard in the bottom panel close up. In those days of no video or internet reference Passingham did a fine job of capturing the scale of the movie and compressing it into the limits of a comic anthology.
Click for larger view
Click for larger view
Trailer for TOBRUK starring Rock Hudson, George Peppard and Nigel Green.
I'm preparing a longer piece on Australian cartoonist Peter Foster but I thought it'd be interesting to contrast two bio's I have for him. The first is from Challenge No. 4, an educational journal from 1978 featuring stories, articles, cartoons and games. The second is from almost twenty years later is from Ballantyne No.1, self-published in 1996. This volume collected strips from his Sydney Sunday Sun Herald collaboration with James H. Kemsley. In between these two publications Foster worked in England for DC Thomson and IPC as well as illustrating a graphic novel version of the Australian classic For The Term of His Natural Life by Marcus Clarke published in 1986.
