WORKING WITH DIFFERENT SOURCES

Luckily I found HULK newspaper strips in an oversized (and folded) comic magazine series in ex-Yugoslavia. Now I own all the daily strips of the 9th story "Murdock Mountain", but...

all the speech and thought balloons and even the text boxes were altered in size in order to fit the Yugoslavian text. And still the US pocket books have gaps where things have been cut, removed or retouched.

So, sometimes it's hard to put the pieces together and recreate the original appearance like it was supposed to be. Here is the first panel of the strip from June 9th 1980. The pocket book lacks of text (to fit with the the panels of Sunday page before) and the piece of drawing on the left. The Yugoslavian version shows altered text balloons and text box. The microfiche is not the best of sources due to the size in comparison with the scanned strips. But at least we have a result.

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?

Working on "Blind Compassion"

I know, I got stuck with recreating the third Hulk newspaper story at around two-thirds. You can’t imagine how much work it is to get these strips clean and appealing as they should be. Lately I checked the eighth storyline "Blind Compassion" which ran from 1980-02-26 till 1980-05-18. It is the last one that also appeared in the Italian magazine "Eureka" but stopped at 1980-04-14.

Publisher Ace Tempo Books printed the story in the fourth pocket book. But a lot of textboxes were cut and panels appeared in a different order. Even some of the panels and speech balloons are missing in their entire. That's what makes it difficult to restore and recreate the strips like they originally appeared in the newspapers of 1980.

Thirteen dailies are affected by missing text. The only way to get it back was through the microfiche newspaper archives on the internet. For sure it's not the best to take these low resolution templates, but better than nothing. So, with three different sources I at least managed to recreate the original look of those strips. The little boxes with credits and date are cut or left out in the pocket books. I had to fake them using parts of other months. At this point, the strips you see here are just added together almost without any cleaning of the pages done.