InsaneJournal

Have people been reading Comic Book Resources' interviews with the Wednesday Comics writers and artists? There's a new one up each week, and they're filled with all sorts of neat behind-the-scenes tidbits.

For example, the one with Kurt Busiek pointed out something that I (and every single review I've read) managed to miss. Lots of folks pointed out that the Kamandi strip was basing itself off of Prince Valiant, but everyone missed that the Green Lantern strip was basing itself off of Mary Perkins, On Stage.

Busiek: Well, every day that I was working on the Green Lantern strip, I would be sitting on the floor of my office with a full-size reproduction of Leonard Starr’s “On Stage” funny pages from the early 1960s all around me. Partly that was because Starr is one the absolute greats in the genre and partly it was because the Green Lantern strip is set in the 1960s and we wanted to capture that feeling. In our case, it’s right down to the lettering. We’re using a font based on Ben Oda’s lettering and Ben Oda was the guy who lettered “On Stage.” So I’m not picking something that as many people are going to recognize as “Prince Valiant” but I was certainly going back to a particular touchstone and that was early 1960s’ Leonard Starr.

Part of that is because Joe Quiñones is so good at doing real people interacting that we wanted to do a story that had a lot that to it and part of it was that it was this jet age, space age storytelling from the Kennedy era, so why not go back and emulate that to some degree?

Here's a neat overview for On Stage that I found online, for the curious: http://profmendez.tripod.com/html/on_stage2.htm



I hear some people balking at the $3.99 price point for Wednesday Comics, but one thing you need to consider is how long it takes the creators to do these giant-sized pages. At the Wednesday Comics panel at this year's San Diego Comic-Con, they were talking about how time-consuming it can be. Just using the two above pages as an example, Paul Pope mentioned that each of his pages took five days to complete, and Busiek mentioned that the first six pages of Green Lantern took him a day each to write.