World's Funnest: Mazzucchelli Pencils/Inks, A Few Additional Notes (Patreon)

Michel Fiffe posted a reply about the unused Earth 3 pencils done by Job Bogdanove -- I know I had a xerox copy of the art but have been unable to find it. I looked through the two sets of xeroxes I have, an 11" by 17" set of inks (and some pencils) and a print-size set (with more pencils and some lettering overlay copies). I will keep an eye out for it, maybe I ditched it for some dumb reason. I can't remember. I also thought I had more pencil copies, but there aren't as many as I thought. It looks like I have all of the interior inks in one-between the two sets, I think I ditched the color copies of the Alex Ross painted pages because they were oversized and battered. I do have a xerox of his pencils. I'll post more of that stuff as things move along here, in some form or another. 

As a conciliatory gesture, here's an example of David Mazzucchelli's pencils and inks for the splash page from the Jack Kirby/Fourth World sequence. This is page 34, and one of my favorite things in the book. The entire Fourth World section was a favorite of mine, I still like the pseudo-Kirby dialog quite a bit, overused quotation marks and ellipses and all. I worked extra-hard to make everything sound like Kirby could have scripted it. 

When David's pencils came in I thought I was the luckiest boy in the world. World's Funnest was full of mark-out moments for me, but this sequence meant a lot more than most of the others as I'm such a fan of both David and Kirby.

One of the things David explained to me about his approach was that he wanted to try to capture some of Kirby's "late" period drawing, to the point of skewing the angle of a few panels (most notably on at least one close-up panel of Darkseid's face). Kirby fans will know what this is in reference to, as Kirby got older some of his work slanted a bit, and David decided he wanted to play with that. I've got pencils for  the rest of the sequence including pages where David blocked out the dialogue (as well as the lettered pencils/inks).

This led me to remember an idea I had for the Fourth World pages that didn't work out. I wanted to include panel description notes on the edges of the pages,  printed in the margins in "Kirby's handwriting". I also asked about yellowing the pages a bit, putting a coffee mug rim and some cigar ash burns on the edges. Joey pointed out that the latter effect would more likely come off to most readers as dirt, that something went wrong in the printing process. I also came to realize that the margin notes would disrupt the flow of the reading experience and I didn't want anything to take away from David's work.

An additional notes to the previous post about the book -- I forgot to add that the original artist for the (then-) "modern" sequence was Howard Porter. Unfortunately, Porter left comics for a few years just before starting the project, so, he was replaced by Doug Mahnke. Mahnke did a solid job -- on a tight deadline, I might add -- but I would have liked to have seen what Porter would have done with the pages. I wanted to use the the most representative artist whenever possible, someone directly associated with a particular sequence (or style, if no one directly connected was available). We couldn't grab anyone who was, at the time, doing current, regular, house style work on DC superhero comics, at least not anyone up to the caliber of the rest of the roster. I toyed with the idea of getting a 90's Image or Image-influenced artist -- to the point of thinking about asking Rob Liefeld -- but after some thought I shot the idea down. I just didn't want any of the pages to look that ugly. Nothing personal to fans of that style. It's just not an aesthetic I enjoy looking at, and despite the bonus WTF-value of having someone like Liefeld in there, (or McFarlane or Lee or whoever, going down the comic book celebrity food chain), it wasn't worth it to me. Not to mention, I didn't trust the story-telling ability of an artist like Liefeld. The gimmick made a lot of sense on paper, but I wouldn't have been happy with the actual printed paper. Mahnke was Joey Cavalieri's call, and a perfect substitute for the job.

If I remember anything else about the art roster I'll add it down the line. 

Welcome to August, by the way. Stay safe, stay healthy, stay sane..