RECREATING THE HULK

Here's something I want to show. Two panels of the end of the fifth HULK newspaper story "The Union Election". Ace Tempo books printed only three of seven panels on the last page of its second pocket book. I guess they wanted to end the story quick on the final pages. Unfortunately the color of this Sunday page had been poorly removed in the Italian magazine EUREKA. To get a better result than that, I used all available sources and all my skills to create the version you see in the bottom row. Not an easy job though...

Like shown above, the Italian reprints are not always the best source. Like the Sunday pages have a loss of quality here and there, some dailies are affected, too. In the second and third week of January 1980 there had not only been one whole strip missing, but the dailies looked like reprinted from microfiche. I managed to recreate five of these twelve strips, using different sources. And I'm still working on the others. Here is the one from January 9th of 1980 for comparison before and after restoration.

Recreating the HULK daily strip of January 7th wasn't easy, too. The Italian reprint is unusable due to the lack of printing quality. Ace Tempo Books cut a bit on the left and changed the angle of the snake head (third picture). Two words of text are also missing in the pocket book. The third row below shows the best I could get done by using the different available sources.

I hate alterations like that below. Sometimes it's hard to recognise them... missing speech ballons, added flags and other stuff. From left to right: Ace Tempo Books, online newspaper archives, my result with a faked "son". Part of the Hulk daily strip from 03-06-1980.

Aw, c'mon, Ace Tempo Books... Why did you have to alter the Sundays, too? The piece of missing arm is okay, but half of the lady's thought balloon? How shall I recreate this with a poor color scan?