Wednesday, Sep 7th, 2011
Autumnal Musings
Random thoughts offered up while taking a deep early-September breath…
From the "Go Westfield, Young Man" Department: We're all mighty thrilled with our upcoming Chuck Jones: The Dream That Never Was, and if you've seen the previews in this space (archived in the "Blog" section of this site) or Kurtis Findlay's site, you're doubtless thrilled, too. Add the folks at Westfield Comics to the "thrilled" list—they're preparing a feature about the book right now. Westfield's content editor, the estimable Roger Ash, is a self-described "huge Chuck Jones fan," and if you've read his coverage on some of our past releases such as Terry, Scorchy Smith, and Bringing Up Father, you're well aware that he knows how to conduct a great interview and put together a snappy hunk o' reading.
We'll let you know when Westfield's Dream That Never Was piece goes live. Meanwhile, check out Westfield, one of the many places LOAC's own Beau Smith hangs his auctorial shingle. Tell 'im I sent you!
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From the "Seamheads Unite" Department: It's no secret I'm a lifelong Red Sox supporter, and I've been to Fenway Park for at least one game a month each season since 2001. Unless the injury bugaboo hits big-time, there seems little doubt this year's edition of the Olde Towne Team will be playing in the October postseason, and of course I hope they go deep into the playoffs and on to the World Series. Still, I must admit, I've had a sinking feeling all season long that the scary-good Texas Rangers may end up repeating as American League champions.
Yours truly during one loooong 2006 rain delay. I'm pointing to the red seat high up in the bleachers marking the spot where Red Sox legend Ted Williams hit the longest home run ever at Fenway Park. A fascinating man, Ted—Leigh Montville's Ted Williams and David Halberstam's The Teammates convinced me of the many personality traits "The Kid" shared with Alex Toth, and those parallels shaped a portion of my thinking as I wrote Genius, Isolated text.
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From the "Using Your Restorative Powers for Good" Department: Closer to home, I've been observing with interest various discussions/debates over whether hardcover reprint volumes should feature color restoration or fill their pages with scans of the originally-printed comics. What follows is strictly my opinion, arrived at based both on my work here at LOAC and from shelling out hard-earned dough-re-mi for many reprint series from our friendly competition (I have extensive runs of both Marvel Masterworks and DC Archives on my bookshelves as well as all the major and several of the secondary comic strip reprint volumes, plus a number of black-&-white reprint projects such as the current Creepy and Eerie Archives).
Simply put: I vote for restored color, every time.
My reasoning is two-fold. First, there's nothing sacred about as-originally-printed coloring and there never was. Too many comics back in the day were sloppily colored, or occasionally suffered from off-register printing problems, or simple snafus somewhere in the coloring process (which was much different in the pre-digital age than it is today, remember). Do I want to pay premium prices to see those glaring errors repeated in books that should be the definitive presentation of these classic works? No—no, I do not.
Second, since many of the works in question are decades old—and in several cases, as you know so well, we're talking material that is sometimes more than seventy-five years old—the condition of the source material being scanned "as is" can be questionable at best. A fifty-year-old newspaper section or comic book is not the same thing as that newspaper or comic when it was freshly minted and selling at the neighborhood newsstand or drug store. Further (yes, I admit this is a selfish issue), my constantly-tired eyes quickly get even more fatigued trying to extract the visual/textual information I've paid good money to acquire out of the muddy and decayed pages repro'ed in "scanned as-is" publications.
I'm a great believer in "different strokes for different folks," and I also acknowledge that a great number of factors go into the look of any book, meaning it's certainly possible for a "restored" volume to miss the mark, leaving it to some future publisher to present the "definitive" version of a given work. All I'm saying is that my preference is for restored material versus straight-scanned material, and if every archival edition produced by every publisher had to be all one way or all the other I'd opt for restoration, every day and twice on Sunday.
Your mileage may vary, of course.
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From the "Spirit of Independence" Department: The bankruptcy and liquidation of Borders was certainly not welcome news for any lover of books and periodicals (and to a lesser extent, video and music). My town's Borders was located very close to my home, so it was easy for me to take a half-hour or so each Sunday and swing by to browse the magazine stands and the New Arrivals sections.
Despite that convenience, my preference has always been to frequent and support independent bookshops; as the years have passed I've been saddened to see one independent after another pulled down by the various market forces at play. Those doughty independent stores that continue to enrich their communities deserve all the recognition—and business!—they can get. If you have a particular favorite home-grown bookstore, please drop me a note at info@loacomics.com with store's name and address. If we get enough responses, I'll do a follow-up feature—if nothing else, it could serve as a handy directory of good places to visit if you're traveling for pleasure or for business, since roaming the stacks of a good independent bookstore is a mighty relaxing way to spend an afternoon!
posted by Bruce Canwell