Monday 18 June 2007

The invisible Fred Abberline.

I 've been doing quite a number of interviews over the last few weeks in connection with the release of The Black Diamond Detective Agency. In one of them the interviewer brought up the old story about the invisible Fred Abberline in the epilogue of FROM HELL, and it occurred to me that most of my readers have probably never seen the mistake since it was fixed in later printings.
What happened is that because of the system here at campbell industries, heads would get inked at a different time from bodies, and the pencils would be erased by a different person (Anne) from the one who had done the drawing (me, Pete or both of us) and therefore when I missed inking Abberline's small head in one panel, it was cleaned up and erased and the ommission went unnoticed. Thus the famous invisible Fred Abberline. Such booboos are commonplace in the making of comic books; this error was very small as errors go, but what is curious is that whoever at Kitchen Sink Press prepared the ad for the book used that page as the basis of the layout, placing objects on top of it, and failed to notice the incomplete figure, over which he or she discreetly dropped a photo of the From hell t-shirt. Sim and Moore seized upon the fault in a chat that Dave was running on the back of Cerebus and mocked it mercilessly. This is Alan writing, mimicking exactly his style of presentation in the FROM HELL scripts:

From the back of Cerebus #217
Correspondence
FROM HELL
On the matter of what has been viewed in some quarters as an untoward wordiness in my panel descriptions, might I draw your attention to the final volume of From Hell, specifically to page two, panel five of our epilogue, The Old Men On The Shore. In the script description for this panel I unfortunately allowed myself a moment of laxity and omitted the words "INSPECTOR ABBERLINE’S HEAD IS STILL ON HIS SHOULDERS DURING THIS PANEL. IT HAS NOT RETREATED TORTOISE-LIKE INTO HIS NECK, NOR HAS IT IN SOME FASHION MANAGED TO REFRACT LIGHT AROUND IT LIKE A KLINGON SPACESHIP SO THAT THE INSPECTOR RESEMBLES SOMETHING OUT OF MAGRITTE WITH HIS BOWLER FLOATING THERE SUSPENDED ABOVE THE EMPTY COLLAR OF HIS COAT." Last time I’ll make that mistake, obviously.
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well, I never! My pal mr j in the uk SUN online with his On the Mat:
WE have a hilarious new wrestling cartoon each week - the latest features CM Punk
Longtime readers of me blog will remember that On the Mat evolved from Hayley Campbell Funnies, and the wee lass still appears in it.
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and a link from my pal Bob Morales, which should be of interest to all us internet users:
U.S. Internet defamation suit tests online anonymitySat Jun 16, -BOSTON (Reuters)

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6 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi Eddie,

Apropos of nothing, Michael Moorcock reviewed 'Horace Dorlan' the third book by Andrzej Klimowski, 'which alternates text and pictures' as opposed to the previous stories which were without words, in the weekend's paper.


http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2103945,00.html

Best,

Ben Smith

18 June 2007 at 07:07:00 GMT-5  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Curious...I have the Kitchen Sink copies and don't recall that. Don't always notice every detail when the story is carrying you along, I think.

Curious too to see those ageless swingers George and Lynne are still in The Sun.

18 June 2007 at 10:10:00 GMT-5  
Blogger Dan Guy said...

Best laugh I've had all day -- thank you. I never noticed it either, and I have first printing.

18 June 2007 at 11:09:00 GMT-5  
Blogger Christopher Moonlight said...

And they said Campbell would never get a head.

18 June 2007 at 20:07:00 GMT-5  
Blogger James Robert Smith said...

Abberline was just a suit, anyway.

19 June 2007 at 21:09:00 GMT-5  
Blogger drjon said...

Apropos of, here's something you might remember seeing...

22 June 2007 at 11:07:00 GMT-5  

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