Thursday, June 17, 2010

Red Mike hunts the scissor boy

Detail from title page, Charlie Yup and His Snip-Snap Boys, Flora's third children's book, 1959. That's Charlie, snipping away at right; the villain with the lasso is Red Mike.

In the book, Red Mike is ... red. However, as with many illustrated books of the period, color pages alternated with black and white to make printing more economical. A number of Flora's kiddie books reflect this trend.

2 comments:

Ernie said...

So, are you dropping a little hint that some of these B&W pages might also be found in color somewhere? Like maybe deep in an archive? And maybe they will someday see the light of day? :)

Irwin Chusid said...

Actually, no, Ernie. The original art (for Fabulous Firework Family and Cow Sneezed) we've seen in academic archives reveal that Flora provided color art for color pages and b&w art for alternating pages.

Ward Jenkins has more on the practice (particularly as it relates to Flora) at his Ward-O-Matic blog.