The original art for an old Egmont story was just sold at a Norwegian auction. They tried to auction it off without any bids at least twice before re-listing it really cheap. I guess not many people was interested in this, but I ended up getting it mostly out of curiosity.
The story was created in 1983 and first published in Europe in 1984. It's a 4-page story featuring Hiawatha and not really that interesting. It's mostly just a gag story stretched over 4 pages. The British writer George Beal is credited for the writing and the artwork is done by Ramos Poquí from the Spanish Studio Recreo. But the story was commissioned by the Danish Disney licensee Gutenberghus (now Egmont).
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| Inducks data for the story |
The original art came together with a copy of the original dialogue, a small size copy of the artwork and a Certificate of Authenticity from Disney Auctions.
The first strange thing to notice about this lot is that the creator credits on both the original art and the dialogue print has been taped over! This was probably done for the original auction at Disney Auctions, and I'm guessing it was sold there sometime between 2001 and 2006. By that time, it was already a common practice to list creator credits inside Disney comics contrary to earlier years. So I don't see any reason why they wanted to hide the creator credits.
I didn't want to try to remove the tape, but holding the paper up to the light clearly show the credits underneath.
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| Credits under the tape on the original artwork |
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| Credits under the tape on the dialogue print |
I did some searching online and it looks like the same was done to other pieces of original art sold at the same time. Ex. The Dream and Big Bad Wolf Parachutes, found on comicartfans.com
I also tried to do some searching on archive.org to find out when this was sold. But with re-directs and the actual auctions being listed on eBay the old pages are not properly archived. I tried to search for various variants of the auction pages (no longer working) including:
http://www.disneyauctions.com
http://disneyauctions.go.com
http://pages.ebay.disney.com/index.html
It wasn't much useful information to find, but I did get a look at how the original auction page had looked like over the years.
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| Various versions of the auction page found on archive.org |
Here's a scan of the Certificate that was included.
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| Certificate of Authenticity (click to enlarge) |
The original artwork is folded in two and reinforced on the back, but the whole page was actually drawn on one big sheet.
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| The original artwork is folded and reinforced with tape |
Here's the size compared to a Norwegian and British print of the story:
When comparing the original dialogue with the British text, it doesn't look like much localization was done. But there are a few minor differences here and there.
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| Original dialogue (top) and a British print (bottom). Click to enlarge |
It's also interesting to compare the original art to the printed art. There's a lot of details that you barely notice when reading the comic book that the artist used a lot of time to draw! It's hard to illustrate properly, but here are a couple of comparisons to the Norwegian print:
