Time to dig out another fun old 60's joke book from another old box of Cracker Jacks full of wonderfully old, corny balorney gags and superb illustrations. I've posted a few of these teeny tiny prize gems before, so use the handy search engine after you finish today's post for lots more. There's actually quite a few clever zingers in this batch, so remember them for Halloween 2021-- because the way this year is zippin' by-- it will be here before you know it!
6 comments:
I love how the kids are drawn. And the driver of the green truck with his two front teeth. That’s hilarious. And of course I love how teeny it is!!
I wonder what the printing and binding process was for this? Is it 3 color, and then printed with separate pieces and then put together? It's really interesting how the color palette changes across the book.
I love the day-glow and seemingly crazy clown, I love the mean pig, the elephant spraying the monkey, there's all sorts of good illustrations here, and I think the 2 primary color nature of the illustrations (many without black outlines) works really well.
A nice find!
Yeah this is pretty neat from a printing design standpoint.
My guess is that we are looking at eight folded sheets, each printed on both sides, and also a single-sided cover. Each page, likely reproduced many times on a much larger sheet and then cut down to size for assembly, seems to be printed in two spot colors. I'm using the term "spot color" to indicate that I don't think there's process color here. To make red, they've mixed red ink, applied it to a plate, and passed the sheet through a press. In process color, they would make the same color using yellow and magenta, passed through the press twice. That mix makes red.
So to get those red and green pages, for example, they've passed the sheets through the press twice. It would take a precode comic book printer three passes to make the same effect: Every detail would be printed in yellow, and then the parts that become red would be over-printed with magenta, and the details to be green would be over-printed in cyan. In the places where details are lighter, that's just a simple half-tone dot screen in the same color.
I love the effect, and probably it's a lot cheaper than process color for these shorter run projects. They are being very frugal. For one thing, there are less color passes--just two on each side. It looks like they are using the inks more equally than four-color process would (CMYK usually really hogs black and yellow, using rather less in the way of magenta and cyan). Also, it's quite likely they were using this technique to spend residual inks left over from other projects. A hundred books down the run--if these were printed twenty-five-up, that's just four sheets--they may have reloaded with all different colors. Nobody would know any different and it wouldn't effect the art here a single bit.
I like the jokes too, of course!
A lot of fun in a liddle package!
That looks like Wally Wood art?
My favorite is the kid with the big floppy engine-eer hat, haha... and Wally Wood is definitely a good guess here. Thanks for the great comments, and kudos to Mr C as usual for supplying much additional great printing info!
Friday Frights is up next, pack an extra pair of underoos cuz its gonna get batty!
I agree with Guy Callaway. Certainly looks like Wally Wood.
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