I gathered these Atlas-Seaboard gems up many years ago. As Famous Monsters of Filmland knockoffs go, these are really good ones. The first issue bears a December date and might well be the first Atlas-Seaboard publication, though that's suspect.
Greg Theakston, he of Pure Imagination Publishing fame and creator of the process of "Theakstonization" for cleaning up smudge and dirty comic pages, turns in two really evocative images for issues one and two. I especially like the Cyclops, the misbegotten but very memorable monster from Ray Harryhausen's Sinbad epic.
George Torjussen though really knocks it out of the park with his two paintings, especially the final one featuring The Thing from Outer Space. That's a fantastic image, and Torjussen has related how he had to watch the movie on late night television to remember what The Thing looked like. He sure did though, giving us a real insight into the shadowing invader.
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A small correction: Theakstonization isn't specifically about cleaning up smudges and dirty comic pages. Its main purpose is removing all the color from a printed comic page while leaving all the black ink, producing a black-and-white page that can be used for reprinting these comics if the original art is lost. This is a tricky and hazardous business, because it involves acquiring and essentially destroying one copy of a vintage comic! Once the black and white page is created, it can then be retouched digitally using high resolution scans, and the smudges and stray blobs of ink typical of a cheaply printed comic book page can be removed.
ReplyDeleteI can attest to the above from personal experience as Greg is a former employer of mine, and I helped out with a bit of Theakstonizing…not to mention the long hours I put in touching up the scans in Photoshop. (Cleaning up illegible word balloons by copying words and letters from other balloons on the same page was my favorite part.) I even know a couple of the secret ingredients in the Theakstonizing process, but I'll never tell.
I always dug those Cyclops and Zaius paintings…but would you believe I never realized they were by Greg until now?
Thanks very very much for the clarification on "Theakstonization". It's always nice to get such inside info from someone who really knows.
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