Black Diamond Western curiosities

[JonTheScanner]

I see that Lev Gleason tired to get into the "3D business" as well with his "Deep Dimension" version of Black Diamond Western #51.  I guess the comic panels are supposed to remind one of looking at a curved Cinerama movie screen -- but at only four panels to a page it sure cut down on the story.  The next issue also has the four stacked panels per page and has some attempts at 3D effects like the knife throw on page 4 of the story, but without the curved panel borders.

Another strange things about the scan of #52 that Maria uploaded is its cover date: August somewhat blacked out with October written above.  The copy of the comic I have just has an October date with no blacked out August.  Both say August in the indicia.

[narfstar]

Wonder if the aborted attempt at 3D effect slowed everything down ended up with a first and second print run

[darkmark (RIP)]

John Wooley had a great article on the various attempts to copy "3D" in comics in, I think, the old fanzine DREAMLINE.  If you can find it.

[Poztron]

This doesn't directly follow from the preceding posts, but the topic is in the general ballpark, so here goes.

Last night I was reading through the scan (found here at DCM) of Black Diamond Western #36, whose 2nd story is "Mystery of the Murder Mine" with art by Dick Rockwell. I had the art onscreen at pretty much full resolution and it was really driven home to me (Once again) how quite good art was undercut by bad color registration and bad printing. I mean, look at pgs. 3 or 7 of that story, mentally strip out the color and fill in the under-inked blacks. Really tasty art IMHO, but totally undercut by the printers. I'm tempted to take a page into Photoshop and filter out the color and see if I can produce an approximation of the original B&W art. Perhaps I'll do that when I've got some spare time, but I just wanted to point out that Rockwell, (who is totally unsung, as far as I know), did some nifty work.

[Yoc]

Poor printing seemed the norm at Fox as well as many others.  It must have broken a few artist hearts in the day.