Thread:Johnnybravo44/@comment-5742447-20121114091153/@comment-5742447-20121115014928

Hi Midoki 24; Thanks for the reply! I have just uploaded the US and Australian covers of the same Master Comics #107 issue to the website - have a look - it's a hoot! A bit of background: During the war, American comics were considered to be non-essential imports in Australia and thus became largely unavailable. As a stop-gap, reprints of old pre-war daily newspaper comic strips were produced locally in comic book form with covers by local artists, who also issued a large number of home-grown comic books of their own to fill demand. Many of these were equally as imaginative as their American counterparts, but with a distinctive Australian flavour. (See: http://www.lambiek.net/artists/m/mercier_emile.htm) After the war, American comics became available in Australia again but, in order to preserve precious foreign exchange, they were printed in Australia from Photostats of the original black and white American artwork. Local editions of DC (Batman, Superman etc.) and Disney titles were reprinted in full colour, but the Fawcett titles (Captain Marvel, Bulletman etc.) were, excepting the covers, printed in black and white on cheap pink or pale grey newsprint stock in order to save money. As a further economy measure, Fawcett printed their comics in landscape format, with two reduced comic pages side by side on each page. One interesting spin-off of all this was that, in order to preserve Australian traditions, these locally printed editions had the American dialogue balloons retouched so that the words conformed to the accepted English spelling; e.g, “color” became “colour” and “theater” became “theatre”. Fawcett sometimes went even further by changing the names of American cities to Australian cities. Even as children, we knew what was going on, because the alterations were so crudely lettered. This reached the height of absurdity with the attempt to “Australianise” the September 1949 American issue of Master Comics, which depicted Captain Marvel Jr. attempting to recover the stolen Statue of Liberty. For the Australian edition (which was published in September 1950), the cover was redrawn to fit Fawcett’s landscape layout, and the photograph of the Statue of Liberty was replaced by one of the Sydney Harbor Bridge (see attached drawings). Inside, some poor local hack artist had to retouch all the Photostatted drawings to remove the Statue and insert the Harbor Bridge instead. It was a total disaster. We all laughed at the clumsiness of the drawings, and the total disparity in size and layout of the two objects, which failed miserably to render the idea convincingly. I only wish I could find a copy of either comic! I don’t remember any further attempts to “correct” the American comics on such a scale. Regards Cam