Thursday, June 4, 2009

If You're Following Pandemonia, Please Read This Post

Here we begin dailies with the Sundays in chronological, consecutive order. It gets a little complicated here, so let me explain. 

I have most of the dailies, clipped from the paper. But scanning from cheap newsprint is far from crisp and archival. The book, Prehysterical Pogo, is less than complete for total continuity, yet has extra art to help bridge the abridgments, and the art is crisp'n'clean. 

OK, so what I'm doing is this (completist that I am for this kind of project): I'm scanning the daily strips from the book for the cleanest purest art, cross-checking with my clippings to make sure they're in proper order, but when they skip strips (usually the ones that revert back to the Okefenokee) I am inserting my clipping scans (and you can tell which those are because they will be the 4 panels, straight across strip). The book scans will be the 2 tier squarish format (easier to scan that way, but also makes it more convenient for you to look at, and also to make any digital compendium you might want to assemble).

Following me so far?

OK. So just for your completist information, the panels from the book have extra art around the edges of each panel. I don't know if they were cropped for the newspaper, or if they were added for the book, but many times where it's done you can see, on close-up inspection, where that occurs. So that's a plus for using those book scans for our continuity. But also, though, the book strips sometimes have extra lettering or little image inserts to, as I said before, bridge the abridgments. 

On a couple of occasions new art is inserted to summarize a Sunday strip that wasn't reprinted but had pivotal plot devices. I am including those as well (completist that I am) immediately following that particular Sunday strip, and I will try to make note of that for your enlightenment.

Basically, I'm trying to post everything I have for Pandemonia, in proper order, and please note: each day's strip and its addenda will be one post at a time (but maybe several times a day). That way I can keep track of chronology and YOU, dear reader, can keep track if you are downloading these for some reason. Each strip is dated on its file label so that if you dump them into one file, they will stay in order.

Whew, have I explained enough? Um, not yet. The strip shown above is just to show you what the clipping looks like compared to the book dailies, which will start in the very next post. So if you Kelly faithfuls are going to collect these in some organized form you'll need to figure a system, but I've tried to help, with the order and the embedded dates.

I wish I could post a whole batch at any given time, but I've got other (paying) deadlines, and besides, I want this 'blog to last more than a week. But even so we're going to blaze through the year pretty quickly.

So have fun, and I'm going to continue to annotate as I am inspired. But PLEASE, drop some comments along the way so that I know someone's following along. I'd love for you to share your feeling about Kelly, his art and storyline, Pandemonia, what any of this means/meant to you and your life and work. Please tell friends to check in, Kelly's work should be seen and appreciated by more people.

These posts and any downloading you might do are for your enjoyment and edification only. Any unauthorized commercial use of them would be unlawful and would violate the copyright of this work.

5 comments:

  1. Looking forward to this; I've seen a LOT of Kelly material but I've never seen a long run with daily and Sunday strips integrated. This should be a nice filler as we wait for the Fantagraphic books to start. (I've heard the problem there is finding some of the Sunday strips; since the daily strips have been reprinted at least twice for the first few years I understand why they're waiting. But it's frustrating.)

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  2. Hi Thomas,

    This is great..!
    I really enjoy your blog, it's enormously inspiring.
    Keep up the great work!

    And thanks,
    Gerben

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  3. Don't worry we'll be here watching and laughing and oohing and aaahing THANX

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  4. This is awesome. i have been looking for Pogo strips for a while now. check out my site. http://ilovecomix.smugmug.com

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