WOODY COVERS
During the period I was working with Woody Woodpecker for the Scandinavian market my editor came to me and said that he needed more covers in the old tradition. Apparently he had used all the old covers from the US Lantz publications, and he needed more with Woody as the main figure.
So I set to work and I produced a big bundle until Ulf Granberg said to me ‘You can stop now, I guess we’ve got enough’.
Whether or not he had by then been aware of the possibility that the publication might not continue I don’t know, but I only got paid for the covers used, and true enough I ended up having made more than necessary, and I was only paid for the motives that hit the print.
In this document I present those being left over in the process and thus never published. As I recall it the pay was okay for the motives used. Semic Press had a tradition paying a fair price for cover motives, often painted by Spanish artists. That made the Semic publications stand out on the newsstands as something a bit more adult that the competitors from Williams, since they reminded more of the covers on pulp literature pocketbooks.
As for Woody I tried to follow in the footsteps of great US Comics creators adding my personal Woody design, which had been accepted by Lantz himself, as he saw and signed my file copy of the Happy Water album when I met him during his visit to Copenhagen.
You may find that some of the motives seem familiar. It may be because colleagues before or after has done the same thing as I did, namely to browse through foreign comic books for ideas that could be used again.
Of course I tried to make certain the ideas had not been used before on the Scandinavian market, but it may have slipped my attention. I did switch some covers produced for the Dutch Donald Duck, particularly by my good friend Daan Jippes, since I knew Egmont was not using these covers in their own magazine production. One of these did appear in a Dutch version which made my Dutch duck editor raise his eyebrows...