This episode was made in chapters for the Scandinavian Woody Woodpecker magazine and later printed in black and white in Critters.
I had earlier made a story with Gnuff meeting art in Animal Graffiti, and now I wanted to try my luck with another arty theme, concert music. I let Gnicky be a musical prodigy, appropriately by getting a blow on the head from a heavy piano lid. This I felt was the proper way of handling matters in a comedy context.
Still I managed to put in a few puns at the way that genre is handled, and especially towards the questionable treatment of kids, who are discovered as having some special talent and thus deprived of a normal childhood. Thereby I strengthened the social aspects of the theme.
Privileged people sometimes grow dissatisfied with the burden of living up to their talent and the negative consequences this eventually have. There is always a price to be paid. Also parents can present painful behavior concerning their gifted kids, especially if they have some unfulfilled ambitions concerning a successful breakthrough of their own.
There have been a number of films dealing with that, and I have seen a bundle of them. And who but the film industry could do a more convincing portrait of the costs of success? This I had to include in my story, as well as commercialism trying to control things and having a huge piece of the cake of success. In my own domain of writing and drawing I have been made aware of similar motives, but when dealing with music the clash between the classical music tradition and commercialism stand out so much more.
I cannot escape the urge to cover a moral motive when it is available, but that is really what fairytales are all about, and I willingly take upon me that responsibility. I hope things still come out to be funny to experience when reading it.
The technical matters concerning the coloring technique may lead to some comments. The original printing was for the magazines, and in the old days the printing was not that thorough. The comicbooks had to be cheap.
Consequently the printing films had to be robust, and no scanning was used. The colors were produced technically much like a Technicolor process, where films for each color was made from celluloid overlays where the exposure was made three times in the percentage that particular color needed in blue, red and yellow.
Of course it was easy only to use percentages of the basic colors and some secondary colors where only two colors were mixed. It required an extra turn through exposure for colors where all three basic colors were blended, such as the brown ones.
I stretched that technique to the limit with my color indications. I had only a range of 10 to 12 colors, but no one said which colors it should be, so I often asked for colors on the third level where the overlays had to be exposed three times in the camera.
Fortunately I never heard anyone frown over that, and I had some personal contact with that Danish firm later, when they made the printing films for another publisher doing one of my own stories in album form. Here the film grain was finer, since it would go to through a more refined printing process.
The group of music fans in this story was reused later in a which way album called Sort Hul (Black Hole) where the plot was all about the trio appearing in a band wanting to be a great success. The readers chose which way to go with that story, and through their reading choice they came around a lot of potential outcomes for musicians having that ambition.