6 February 2022

Don Lawrence art - a mystery

The latest Catawiki auction of British comic art (which I covered here) includes this page of Don Lawrence art...

...which looks all fine & dandy. Here it is in the Looks & Learn book of the Trigan Empire reprint (1973), page 65 to be precise

BUT in the recent Treasury of British comics reprint you'll see that these images were originally spread over two pages...



these are page 72+73 of the reprint...and now when you look at it you can see that the pages are different. There's lots more 'sky' in the images in the middle row of the 'Catawiki' page than in the original page & the Catawiki image has 4 slaves up against the wall rather than the 5 in the Treasury image.

Often when comic strips are reprinted in annuals the pages have to be re-sized and this leads to extra additions to the panel being done by someone in-house (rather than the original artist) - so you get extra swathes of sky or wall. Easy to do stuff basically. In this case though Lawrence has either re-drawn the page completely (which seems unlikely) or, perhaps more likely, this is a 'Frankenstein's monster' of a board. By which I mean the original frames have been cut from the original art board and pasted onto a new board and then expanded where necessary (the middle tier) to fit the new page size.

That would mean that it was Don's art plus the art of an in-house art bodger on a page that is for sale - but it's not the art as it was originally presented to readers of Look & Learn.

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