Wednesday, December 2, 2009

William Overgard out West

Quite a few years ago, I purchased a batch of Australian editions of Dell Western comics.  The bad news about these particular versions is that they are all edited -- the first several pages of the stories cut to fit into a smaller page-count format -- but the good news is -- they are printed in black and white.  This allows for a clean reproduction of the linework, unobscured by the sometimes heavy handed color found in comics of the period.  I'm particularly glad I got this book in that lot -- Zane Gray's The Rustlers as drawn by William Overgard.  

When teaching in the comics program at MCAD, I used panels and pages from this book as examples of simplicity and clarity in composition and storytelling.  I've scanned a few pages to share here.  I'm knocked out by how good this work is.  Click on the images for a larger view.




1 comment:

Mike Moran said...

Wow! What an awesome find. There are some more TOTH reprints coming soon too.