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  • Henry R. Kujawa January 29, 2014 at 1:31pm

    You've read the novel! You've seen the movie! Now-- read the comic!
      Dell's FOUR COLOR #614 (late 1954) presents...

    Jules Verne's 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA

    adaptation by Gaylord DuBois / art by FRANK THORNE!!!
    Gloriously, painstakingly restored! (Trust me, folks, this looks BETTER than when the comic was NEW.)

    Part 1 of 3:
    http://professorhswaybackmachine.blogspot.com/2014/01/jules-verne-p...

  • Mark S. Ogilvie January 29, 2014 at 1:57pm

    Only comics, I was wondering if they'd mention this

    http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077156/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_55

  • Luke Blanchard January 29, 2014 at 2:52pm

    An adaptation of the novel that appeared in the British children's educational magazine Look and Learn can be read here (reprinted by permission). It was reprinted in the Lion Annual for 1981.

  • Henry R. Kujawa January 29, 2014 at 7:57pm

    Luke, THANKS!!!  All that work and research last year, and there's one I hadn't seen AT ALL!!!

    I will probably make an addition to the initial "20,000 LEAGUES" overview in Parts 1 & 2.

    SEVERAL of the books I discovered were actually reprints of the same books... but it took some time to figure out which versions were reprinted where.  You can see why, in trying to do an overview of what i considered "classic" authors (Verne, Wells, Doyle, Poe), I started with a story that has been retold SO MANY TIMES!!

    Any idea when the LOOK AND LEARN version originally appeared?  I did my best to set up my overview chronologically.

    As soon as I get the Dell version processed (I'm giving it more than usual, about the same amnount of care I used on STORIES FROM THE BIBLE and the 1966 BATMAN strip), I plan to process the newspaper strip version of the movie, and after that, the "Bank Street Classics" version from BOY'S LIFE in the 1990's.  (Painted art by Ernie Colon!!)

    Mark--- AAAUGH!!  I have the edited "movie" version of that thing on videotape.  One of the WORST things in my entire collection (which numbers at least 2000 videotapes).

  • Henry R. Kujawa January 29, 2014 at 8:08pm

    Luke, have you seen my overview?  I'm wondering if the magazine version may have been one of the ones I already covered, published in a different magazine?

    In the early 70's, Vince Fago, who had been Marvel's EDITOR when Stan Lee was in the army, oversaw an entire line of "Classics Illustrated" (after Gilberton closed up shop).  They did a version of 20,000 LEAGUES which had apparently been serialized in a schoolastic magazine sometime in the late 60's.  That version has been reprinted at least twice SINCE the early 70's, including only a few years ago.  I'm wondering if that might not be the SAME one that Bear Alley posted?

  • Luke Blanchard January 29, 2014 at 10:42pm

    I don't think so. Look and Learn used to regularly publish novel adaptations in the 70s, and the version was likely drawn for the magazine, and intended to be reproduced in B&W. The instalments were two pages long and introduced by a title panel, as at Bear Alley. The magazine was a weekly. I have the issues with instalments 6-11. Part 6 appeared in #712, dated 6th Sep 1975; part 11 in #717, dated 11th October 1975.

     

    I also have the Lion Annual with the whole adaption. It's the annual for 1981 on the cover, but British annuals were aimed at the Christmas market, so my guess is it was published in 1980. The adaptation appears there in two parts. The title logos and story-so-far text have been removed from most of the introductory panels, and they've been touched up (to hide their art-empty spaces) and supplied with new text so they read like panels of the story. The text of the other panels is the same but has been rearranged.

     

    I early encountered the story of 20,000 Leagues in a comics version. I thought that was the Look and Learn one, but right now I think it can't have been as I don't think I ever had the issues immediately preceding #712 and I definitely remember reading the opening part of the story. I only acquired the Lion Annual recently. I dimly remember a contradiction in who gets picked up by the giant squid: in the Look and Learn adaption it's Captain Nemo, and it seems to be him on the cover of Marvel Classics Comics #4, but I think in that other version it was someone else. There may have been a panel where the "eyes" of the Nautilus, before it's revealed to be sub, shine like searchlights.

     

    Bear Alley has two pages from another adaptation in this post. I don't know any more about where and when it appeared than can be inferred from the book-extract in the post. If I follow this correctly the adaptation is from Tell Me Why.

     

    Lew Stringer blogged on Tell Me Why here. He has pages from a continuation series called "The Adventures of Captain Nemo", which appeared in a Disney magazine, here. I originally described this as an adaptation, but I think that's incorrect.

    (corrected).

  • Luke Blanchard January 29, 2014 at 10:50pm

    Apparently the artist of the Look and Learn adaptation was Bill Baker (commercial site link). His bio on the page I've linked to lists it and the page in the gallery from his The Sea Wolf adaptation is in the same style.

  • Henry R. Kujawa January 29, 2014 at 11:03pm

    Thanks for the info.  I'm gonna have to add this to my index, and eventually (I hope) to the blog.  I found Steve Holland's e-mail and wrote him to ask his permission to (at some point) re-post his scans as part of my general "Jules Verne" project.

    I know a lot of English weeklies are like Sunday comics sections, with 2-page spreads, often with painted color.

    I'm not sure at the moment which magazine in the US did that adaptation around 1968-- WEEKLY READER or JUNIOR SCHOOLASTIC.  But it was reprinted by Pendulum Press, THEN by Marvel Comics (with a really horrid cover), then again in 1980, then again around 1990, then again around 2010!  That one was by Otto Binder and had art by Romy Gaboa & Ernie Patricio.  I've only seen one page of it, and I'm not crazy about the art, as compared to several others. 

    Even so, I've seen worse.  There's AT LEAST 2 additional adaptations, both fairly recent, which I didn't include in my overview (I may add them eventually), as I was getting worn out doing the project, and these 2 had what I considered downright amateurish artwork.  How many versions of any story does anyone need?

  • Luke Blanchard January 30, 2014 at 1:18am

    The formats used in British comics haven't been constant. There was a British tradition of comics with painted art pages on glossy paper, inaugurated by the original Eagle, but I think they were all gone by the mid-70s: I don't recall seeing any. The 70s British comics weeklies were printed on really cheap paper and were mostly or entirely B&W. The early issues of 2000 AD were like that; as I recall, the only interior colour pages were the pages of the centre spread. Other comics didn't have any interior full colour pages.

    Look and Learn was for a long time printed on glossy paper. Its contents were predominately text features illustrated with painted art. Its page size changed over the course of its run. There was some reuse of older material in the later part of the period when I got it (and a shift to a different paper stock). It had one long-running painted comics feature, "The Trigan Empire", which had started in a short-lived 60s title called Ranger. For a while after Ranger was folded into it the title had a "Ranger" comics section, but later it cut back on its non-educational comics content (the only ones I remember from this later period are "Eagles Over the Western Front", which the Bear Alley Blog has run in the past, and "Agents of the Queen", which it plans to). Most of the book adaptations I remember from it were B&W (the exceptions are adaptions of The Three Musketeers and The Man in the Iron Mask).

    2000 AD eventually shifted to a better paper stock and started running painted stories, but I don't know when. It may have been in the late 80s or at the start of the 90s. Judge Dredd Megazine has also run painted features. Probably they both still do, and extensively, but I haven't looked at either title for over twenty years.

  • Luke Blanchard January 30, 2014 at 1:40am

    Incidentally, I may not be the only one here who has run into a hardback book from the 80s called Space Wars: Fact and Fiction, the contents of which included painted comics stories titled "Space Cadet" about a character called Jason January. These were from Ranger. In the issues of Ranger I've seen the instalments were two pages. Later Jason January stories appeared in Look and Learn, but I've only seen B&W one-page instalments from there.

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