Charles ‘Sparky’ Schulz & Russel Harvey.

Charles Schulz and Russel Harvey

A few years back I had the pleasure of meeting Russel Harvey, scion of Harvey Comics, at MoCCA in New York City.(You can read about our encounter here.) Since then, we have managed to stay in touch digitally and Russel even generously wrote a blurb for the back cover of ICECUBES the book! Russel posted this photo of himself with the great Charles ‘Sparky’ Schulz and I though I would share it with my readers. In particular I wanted to show everyone how incredibly big comics were drawn back then! I draw at about half that size these days. Of course that only applies to those of us who still draw on paper! 😉

Color matters! Peanuts vs. McDonalds.

comparison

It used to be that comics had really great colors. Big primary colors printed with halftone dots. A lot of the times the color dots were off register and would bleed outside the lines. That was so cool! In fact my wife and I agree that it made the comic better when the color was off register like that!

Nowadays I’ve noticed that colors are no longer printed that way. In fact colors lay real flat on the page now and seem to look dull in some cases. For instance this Peanuts Sunday cartoon just looks flat and lifeless.© Universal Press The colors are drab and dull. Its quite upsetting actually to see a once great comic strip like Peanuts reduced to looking second rate. Whoever colored this did an awful job. But that’s not the only problem. The colors are extremely flat and are perfectly within the lines, how deadening is that? Sometimes too much technology just kills something great.

I did find something cool though. It seems that McDonalds still uses the old halftone print jobs on their Happy Meal bags! I think they look great by the way and so much more dynamic than that poor Peanuts strip. Good job McDonalds, I hope they keep it up! © Mc Donalds
I would love to print an ICECUBES comic book this way! 🙂
© Mc Donalds