Rawhide Kid

Wednesday, 13 August 2008

When I was eight years old my mother took me into town. At the Amstel Station, fifteen minutes from where we lived, we visited a book store, where I had my first encounter with comic magazines. I knew what comics were, my parents had subscribed me to ”Donald Duck” and I had read several other comic books, but I had never seen a comic magazine and I had no idea that there existed something as super heroes! Seeing a rack full of Dutch comic magazines was too much, I was completely hypnotised. My mother told me that I could buy one, and after long thinking, I choose a cowboy comic, called “Rawhide Kid”.
A few years later I had a large collection of Dutch comics, that I all knew by heart. I have no idea what I did with all these comics, but most them were already gone when I left my parents’ home. Last week I found a copy this ”Rawhide Kid” comic in a second hand store. The cover was exactly as I remembered, but the story itself looked very different on first sight. It was clearly not the perfect art that my mind had made of it in all those years. But when I began reading, interesting things happened: all kind of memories came back, and my memory of the comic merged with what I held in my hands.
It is ridiculous that many of the most popular comics in Holland are so poorly lettered. Recently I re-read some Lucky Luke comic books; these books must have been re-printed at least fifteen times in the years since they were published 25 years ago, but the lettering is still the same ugly lettering as in the first edition. Jim Novacs once said that a bad lettering for a comic is what a bad soundtrack is for a movie. To show what that means I re-lettered one page of the ”Rawhide Kid” story:

Hey, there is no soundtrack for today!

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