Memorial project: Tomorrow is Another Day

 

My friend Ralph had a long, maybe 10 year project, he worked on. It was a sequel to his favourite film, Gone with the Wind and he wanted to tell that story basically as a graphic novel or comic book and include as many old Hollywood stars from the film's era into his new story. They had to be around and available to David O Selznick when a second movie would have been made. He used the technique he used in making his renowned paper doll books, drawing out each page on letter sized paper, inking it and then making a copy of the cleaned up artwork to paint with watercolours. This had the extra step of typing out the dialogue for the thought balloons and then attaching them to the finished art before making colour photocopies to produce the final version of each page. 

Sadly my friend did not understand you can't sell a new story based on someone else's copyrighted work so this giant effort could never been professionally published and it was a huge disappointment for him. He showed its and pieces of the work to people but almost never the entire thing despite people, like me, begging him to. I wanted to scan the original art and put into a self published book using the company Blurb so he could see what it might have looked like as a "real"  book and even have copies made for his friends. That wasn't something I could get him to sign on to though. 

Now, after his passing his good friend Dan has spent a lot of time scanning a copies of the entire project he managed to get Ralph to give him so that i can fix it up and make that blurb book and a PDF version for his loved ones. 

This will take a LONG time. I did take the page I thought might be the most challenging and make it usable. I worked on the colour and straightening out the scan but the most difficult part was the text, especially the long list of movies stars listed. Some of the names were unreadable. So I removed all the text except the title by hand and recreated the art beneath it so as to have a clean image to put more readable text over. I hand typed the replacement text and researched names I could not read well to be reasonably sure they were the names Ralph wanted and then re-arranged the placement of them so the names could be a little larger and easier to read when printed. 

On top is the finished page so far and below is the original scan and the page after I removed the text. This isn't nearly the most interesting or exciting page in the book but I think it will be (I hope) the one needing the most work to prepare it for printing. I would have had a full age just for the names so they could be a decent size but this is as far from Ralph's original design I am willing to go.