Tuesday, May 31, 2011

H. Rider Haggard's Allan Quartermain

A book that has been waiting in the wings for some time at Book Palace Books is the collection of H. Rider Haggard stories - King Solomon's Mines, Allan Quatermain and Montezuma's Daughter - which should be amongst the next set of releases.

Above you'll see the opening page of Mike Hubbard's superb adaptation of Allan Quatermain, both the original processed scan and the finished, cleaned-up artwork which has also been relettered in the style of the original as it appeared in Ranger. The only change I made was to lower the lettering on the final panel, which began over the picture on the printed version.

It's a fantastic strip... and one that's going to look great when the book appears. We'll be running a few more teasers over the coming months, just to whet your appetite.

3 comments:

  1. I just bought the Don Lawrence Westerns book and I have a question. There are 2 pages at the end reproduced from Lawrence's original art. This is one of them:

    https://sslrelay.com/bookpalace.com/acatalog/LawrenceWells1.jpg

    After comparing it with the same page printed within the story (aside from the world of difference in detail loss, but that's understandable due to the source material), I noticed that not only the lettering is in all caps here while in lower case in the story, but the dialogues are quite different in the 2 versions of the page, even changing the name of some characters.

    So I can suppose that the second version comes from a reprint of the story in another magazine and not from the original publication in Swift. The word "Wham" seems to be written in pencil on the page, which was the name of another magazine, right? I'm just conjecturing here, I haven't found any evidence on the internet, that's why I'm asking.

    Besides, was it habitual to make such drastic changes in the dialogues for reprints?

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  2. The strip was reprinted in part (36 episodes) in Wham! in 1965 with the star of the strip renamed Johnny Straight. There was also a reprint in the Cor!! Holiday Fun Special 1972.

    And, yes, it was common for reprints to alter the names of characters.

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