NF 266

Located a set of black and white proofs for the New Funnies #266 Woody Woodpecker story yesterday.
With the old Western publishing coloring still intact! (On separate sheets.) Sadly the lettering was missing, but all of the nice Paul Murry art was still there.
Here's a sample.

It's nice that stuff like this still turns up now and then, don't ya think?

Coloring the Woodpecker

Ever wondered how coloring was done back in the 60's?
A few years ago I stumbled over a set of proofs from Western Publishing, the company that published the Disney, MGM, Walter Lantz titles etc. But not only proofs for the black lines but in some cases for the colors too.
Let me run you through a few samples. In this case the proofs comes from Woody Woodpecker #122, a reprint of WW #65. Artwork is by Paul Murry. The writer and colorist are both unknown.

First we have the inked artwork.
While the original art was drawn large, the size of the proof is 100% of the printed comic book.

Then we have the proof for the Yellow color to the left. To the right we see what it looks like when the black proof for the yellow color has been scanned and placed in the yellow channel in Photoshop, together with the black lines in the black channel.

Then we have the proof for Red placed in the Magenta channel.

 

And then the Blue proof placed in the Cyan channel. 

 

Now, let's combine Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black into one CMYK file.

What puzzles me are the big chunks color that doesn't belong to the page. Does anyone know why it's there?

With all the proofs combined it's easy to clean the page from that extra "mystery" color.

Bonus page: I guess most of you can see wich Carl Barks story that inspired the writer of this Woody story? :)

 

And finally a panel for those of you who thought this post was interesting and wants to see those screentones close up. ;)

/Joakim.

Coming up next:

 

Click to enlarge.