At end of last year Dark Horse published a nice little hardcover book collecting daily strips and Sunday pages with Winnie the Pooh. I was a little bit reluctant to get the book at first, partly because I saw online samples and the art looked really pixelated there. And I noticed some other things I didn't like, which I'll discuss below. But getting the book in hand it looks a lot better on print, and the majority of the content I've never seen on print before.
As someone with a special interest in Disney comics there are things I wish was different with a collection like this, but for a casual or "normal" buyer I think this is a great book that I can recommend.
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| Daily strips inside the book |
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| Sunday pages inside the book |
My main disappointment with the book is the selection of the comic strips. This is far from a complete collection and I'd rather see a complete chronological collection of all the strips in a series of books. But even for a selection, I wish they at least would include some strips with the most interesting part of the entire series. And by that I'm talking about Sir Brian and his dragon!
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| Daily strip June 21, 1978 - first strip with Sir Brian's dragon |
This book does not contain a single strip with Sir Brian and the dragon, and they were such a huge part of series from the very beginning to the end! The characters of Sir Brian and the dragon were actually created by Don Ferguson and Richard Moore specifically for the newspaper comics, and an article about this would also have been great.
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| Sir Brian in a 1986 Sunday page |
I can't stop thinking that a collection of the Winnie the Pooh newspaper comics would have been much better as part of IDW's Library of American Comics. And speaking of those books lets do a little size comparison.
As you can see the Dark Horse book is a lot smaller in size than the Disney newspaper books from IDW. That was also a concern of me at first, but getting the book in hand the size didn't really bother me at all.
When printed in the newspapers the daily strips were in black and white while the Sunday pages usually were in colors. In the Dark Horse book all strips are colored, and the Sunday pages with completely new colors and not using the newspaper coloring as a guide like the IDW books.
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| Newspaper coloring (left) vs. new coloring (right) |
When coloring the strips, the original texture effect for shadows and b/w coloring is also removed.
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| Texture removed when coloring |
And all the dialogue is changed to a computer font rather than using the original hand lettering. But I didn't manage to find any examples where the actual dialogue was changed.
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| Original lettering (top) and computer lettering (bottom) |
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| Original lettering (top) and computer lettering (bottom) |
But I suspect that the computer lettering and coloring is not really done for this publication. They are probably updated for distribution to modern newspapers, online viewing and for easier translation. And this book is using those strips as the source material.
My biggest surprise in the book was at the very end. Here we got the three Winnie the Pooh serials created for The Treasury of Classic Tales series of Sunday pages. But the surprise was that these actually are reinked/redrawn versions of the Sunday pages, created with the modern character design. I had no idea this version of the comics existed! Again, this can be illustrated by comparing to IDW's Library of American Comics.
At the end of Treasury of Classic Tales vol.3 we get a preview page for the planned 4th volume, that was supposed to include the original version of the Pooh Sunday pages.
[Note: There was plans for four volumes, but the series was cancelled after the 3rd book due to poor sales. You can hear more about this in episode 6 of the LOAC podcast.]
Here's a panel by panel comparison of the original version and the new one:
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| Original Sunday page (top), and the new version (bottom) |
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| Original Sunday page (top), and the new version (bottom) |
Now I just wish someone would publish the complete run of the original one too!
