Fleein' From a Varmint!

No time to say much this week...just this: 

Gleek! Gleek!

August 31, 1969

GOO! WOZZAT!

This is coming to you a bit late, today, on Sunday. You can pretend your newspaper was a late delivery like ours was today, here in real life. I was a paper boy in my youth and there were days when problems were incessant. 

This Sunday strip had the usual messy stuff to clean up, but I do like to leave traces of high-speed press problems here and there to back up the newspaper experience. Kelly was fully aware of how his hard work too often took its chances in daily reproduction. I'm amazed that his Sundays were not printed in full-color book form during his lifetime. At that time, the only MAJOR full-color book with the full Pogo cast was the hardback song book, which was lovely, but even there the coloring was screwy.

Bless Fantagraphics for their efforts, even if their production is like waiting for Chug-chug, the Mail Duck, to deliver it.

August 24, 1969

A Thrilling Sabbath

Well, if I can't get more than a couple of encouraging hurrahs from Friends-in-Kelly for Kelly publishing ideas, I can only imagine the grand thud that would be heard from the general public.  I'm moving on, with other fish to fry.

I have no time to edit this Sunday's strip for bleed-through and mis-registration. It's as good a sample as any to show a typical pre-editing image.

LLK.

August 17, 1969

unedited

Smearcase This Guy

Kelly has turned this whole Krazy Kat homage inside out and wandered down the street with it. The general public would have no idea what Kelly was sourcing, and so what? With Kelly, we enjoy the journey, not the point of departure nor the destination. The G. Moth steals the show, even as the show goes on.

August 10, 1969

Thank you again, to those who have taken time to share your words of encouragement for continuation of this blog. Later this week, I'll have an important question for you and other members and readers of the Whirled of Kelly. Please check back in a few days...

Stuck with Me 'til the Last Bite of Liverwurst

Finally entering the storyline is the brick-throwing cat, Butch. 

Have you ever uttered words that you thought no one had paid attention to, but later were quoted, so as to cause you embarrassment? Such it is for Beauregard from this strip to next weeks' Sunday strip.

Image-editing these strips is becoming more and more time-consuming, but I will stay on the task as long as I can. I'm losing interest in blogging and the internet in general, and I'm laid up with an injury sustained while on a photography assignment—so who knows how much longer I'll keep the Whirled of Kelly spinning. I only hear from some half-dozen of y'all at any given time (bless you guys), so the motivation to continue is waning. 

We shall see, we shall see . . . 

August 3, 1969

Wily Skill

This strip took even longer than last week's to clean up, with lots of bleed-through from the other side. I'm amazed that it cleaned up as well as it did (with a few flaws left in intentionally). It's also amazing that newsprint survives as well as it does, seeing as how flimsy and porous as it is/was.

Hogarth, the able bodied hornet, is a great little character and he certainly seems dee-licious. That's another lovely Kelly tree, and notice that even though there's very little background in this strip the panels work beautifully because the foreground compositions are so solid. And the word balloons are perfectly integrated, as always.

Basically, an ordinary strip and a work of art!

Happy Sunday, Kelly Sunday!

June 8, 1969

Mere Striplings

So, we start with a new arc from 1969, the one that pays tribute of sorts to George Herriman's Krazy Kat. I say 'of sorts' because Kelly does it in his own round-about unique way. At that time in 1969, I wonder just how many people knew of Krazy Kat or had fond memories of the strip. I knew of the strip at that time, having collected book reprints, but I didn't know anyone else that had even heard of it.

But here we are, back in the land of great Kelly art. Beauregard is 'animated' nicely. I had to work a longer time than usual editing this strip to clean it up from bleed-through and mis-registration and newspaper defects. The following strips will have much of the same problems, and this arc goes on for quite a few weeks. 

Such a labor of love.

June 1, 1969

UPDATE:

As per request, below is the raw scan of the above strip to show some of the deficiencies that I deal with. Looking at it you may not think it was so much. It was mostly the bleed-through that was the most time-consuming to eradicate. And personally, I don't like raw cyans and reds, so I color edit those to my liking. 

And then this story arc consists of a problem of my making — that as a teenager I originally trimmed these pages right up to and over the outer lines of the panels. So I need to amend my sin now by creating a faux margin and ink lines for the outer edges of the panels. All in all it takes a while to make the page presentable (and even then I like to leave a few rough spots here and there so that it still has that newspaper look to it).

raw scan