Following on from recent discussions regarding the Federal Daredevil series I have been digging around in the junkyard and have turned up another Federal edition of Daredevil. This is issue #3 which reprints Daredevil #’s159-162.
It’s an interesting issue insofar as it reprints early Frank Miller stories scripted by Roger McKenzie before Miller took over the writing chores, and also includes a fill-in issue illustrated by Steve Ditko, who also provides the cover for the Federal edition. I guess the Miller issues are in demand and are afforded the reprint treatment but this Ditko issue easily slips under the radar, as does the Brennert issue following Miller’s last issue in this tenure.
I mentioned previously that it was a habit of Federal to drop the splash pages. I assume they did this for two reasons - to accommodate their page count, and to pass off consecutive installments as a single uninterrupted story or arc. Danny also said Federal were prone to more substantial tampering, so I thought it might be interesting to sample and compare one of these Federal pages to the US original.
The first panel in the Federal edit is actually the splash page of the US original, with the credits and title erased and the image flipped. The rest of the panels on the Federal page are from the following page of the US original. The panels have been cropped and rearranged, and the art has even been extended.
So I would readily concede these editions are hardly going to satisfy a purist, especially as the material is generally otherwise available in colour US reprint editions.
There was a time when cutting up the page and reformatting the panels to fit a new page size did not present a dilemma, or violate the original work to any substantial degree. I think of the Signet paperbacks of Batman comics - books I treasured as a child – or K.G. Murray’s Superman Super Library series in the mid-1960’s.
I understand even the first Superman comic was a cutup and rearrangement of newspaper strips! It’s interesting that at some point this practise became untenable for regular superhero comics.
It’s an interesting issue insofar as it reprints early Frank Miller stories scripted by Roger McKenzie before Miller took over the writing chores, and also includes a fill-in issue illustrated by Steve Ditko, who also provides the cover for the Federal edition. I guess the Miller issues are in demand and are afforded the reprint treatment but this Ditko issue easily slips under the radar, as does the Brennert issue following Miller’s last issue in this tenure.
I mentioned previously that it was a habit of Federal to drop the splash pages. I assume they did this for two reasons - to accommodate their page count, and to pass off consecutive installments as a single uninterrupted story or arc. Danny also said Federal were prone to more substantial tampering, so I thought it might be interesting to sample and compare one of these Federal pages to the US original.
The first panel in the Federal edit is actually the splash page of the US original, with the credits and title erased and the image flipped. The rest of the panels on the Federal page are from the following page of the US original. The panels have been cropped and rearranged, and the art has even been extended.
So I would readily concede these editions are hardly going to satisfy a purist, especially as the material is generally otherwise available in colour US reprint editions.
There was a time when cutting up the page and reformatting the panels to fit a new page size did not present a dilemma, or violate the original work to any substantial degree. I think of the Signet paperbacks of Batman comics - books I treasured as a child – or K.G. Murray’s Superman Super Library series in the mid-1960’s.
I understand even the first Superman comic was a cutup and rearrangement of newspaper strips! It’s interesting that at some point this practise became untenable for regular superhero comics.
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