Ron Frantz waded into the world of independent publishing during the B&W boom of
the mid-to-late '80s. Rather than compete with the new boys, he went right for his child-hood
love of Golden and Silver Age comics. He ''re-possessed'' the Golden Age line of characters
from ACE Comics and pursued the talents of Ditko, Toth and Boyette to handle the artwork.
One balmy evening towards the turn of 1998 into '99, Ron and I spoke on the phone (via
the Ditko mailing list). He revealed, when he had received the original artwork for ''Return
Of The Skyman'' #1, he had photocopied the original pencilled work before finding an inker
for the book. After I picked my jaw up off the floor, I graciouly accepted his invitation
to receive photocopies of those copies to post on this site.
From this page on the site, you will be able to link up to each page separately, or
just follow the link below the image and you can view them in their order. At the very bottom
of every page, there is a link back to this main page, if you want to look at another page
out of order.
One of the immediate problems was how to transfer 11x17 pages onto a web site. Left at
their original size, they wouldn't have even fit in the browser screen. Even reduced in size
to respectable dimensions, it still would have taken forever for such pages to download.
Therefore, concessions had to be made in terms of quality to be able to present them to you
at a reasonable size and allow them to be downloaded in a reasonable amount of time. The
images are still huge, and there is some loss of quality, but I think the best compromise
was reached.
I also didn't want to just throw up all 18 pages, for reasons revealed as we go along.
Instead I choose five of the best pages, and panels from four other pages. I decided to
treat this as a study in form, and made the 'cuts' to best illustrate the process involved.
But we can chat more as we go along. Here are the links to all the pages. For the five
complete pages, you will see the finished, comic-book page. If you click on that image,
you will see the pre-inked page.
PAGE 01 - PAGE 06 -
PAGE 07 - PAGE 08 -
PAGE 09 - PAGE 11 -
PAGE 13 - PAGE 16 -
PAGE 18
*** WARNING ***
One of the technical problems that cropped up was my scan went nuts
and scanned the images in at an improper height and/or width, depending upon the images. This
was easily rectified by altering the dimensions to their proper form in the .html text,
so they look JUST FINE in your browser. If you view the images outside of the .html file
they are in, the dimensions will be off (either slightly longer on the full pages, or
slightly wider on the panels' pages). Such is the wonder of .htmling that I didn't have
to go find a brand new scanner, and spend hours re-scanning and re-designing. I'm sure I will
one day, but the images are just fine for now...INSIDE the given files (aka view the images
outside of their respective files at your own risk)!
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