Will Crawford

Came across this guy Will Crawford who used to be an illustrator during the pulp era in the US this is his header, as they're termed in the credits, for the contents page of Adventure vol. 10, No. 6. Notice the pound sign hasn't yet been adopted to denote issue numbers.

I cleaned the image up a bit and tried it in a few different colours, my preference is for the first one, which apes the feel of a faded pulp magazine.

The Virginian

 

Finally after two lengthy pauses, one of a week and a second of closer to eight weeks, I got through Owen Wister’s The Virginian (A Horseman of the Plains). That second pause was close to the end and I almost put the book down for good because the romance phase of the narrative didn’t really have much appeal to me.

 

Yeah it is a good book, it’s an historical western rather than a genre western because Wister was actually there during the period he was writing about. For me a book becomes a genre piece when the conventions it uses and represents become fictional, as well as the narrative within those conventions. More than that though, it’s a must read if you’re at all interested in westerns, both the genre and the history, because it is one of a very few quality western historical novels.

 

There’s a few shocks I store for you if you’re familiar with the TV series from the seventies and are looking for an affable Trampas character, Wister’s Trampas isn’t just a rogue, he’s a thief and a suspected killer. The Virginian himself gets up to some pretty dubious goings on, as we find him playing a key roll in the lynching of some cattle thieves.

 

The Virginian is a book that finds itself on best westerns lists quite a lot but I kinda suspect that you’ll find that the people who compose those lists have rarely read it. In tone and metre, it’s closer to Jane Austen than Zane Grey and there is a depth to the relationships in the narrative, that’s not usual for a western.

 

There are some hiccups too, Wister drifts in and out of first person in an unstructured way that would have an editor screaming down the phone today but you do get used to if after a while. He also is a bit remise with his sense of place, quite often when you’re not quite sure where things are happening.

 

The Virginian is also noteworthy for being the progenitor of the western school mistress stereotype, yes here is where you’ll find her, Miss Molly Wood and I’m sure it’s no surprise to learn that she’s the source of the romantic interest. Molly though is a bit gamier than her latter-day imitators, having to fight off rogue Indians with a pistol as she rescues her wounded lover, who she finds at death’s door.

 

I hesitate to recommend it if you’re into westerns, if you’re into 19th Century fiction, it’s probably more your thing. If you want to give it a go there’s a facsimile of the first edition available at archive.org.

A glass full

Puzzle: A glass of water sits on table in a room at 56° Fahrenheit. The glass is a 1 pint/20 fl oz measure that is full to the brim with water, floating in that water is some ice. Protruding from the surface of the water in the glass is a mass of ice equivalent to 1 fl oz, that is 1/20 of a pint.

When the ice has melted, how much water will have overflowed the glass on to the table?

Please excuse the rather rushed illustration, I knocked it up quickly.

I'm wondering...

Does yellow work as a colour for an undercoat?

Now in color

Back when they introduced colour television to these shores, the sets were so expensive that only a few people had them, retired couples or those with their own businesses and the occasionally keepy uppy family who couldn’t really afford a set. After a few years the rental market soon put a dent in the colourless numbers but for a while, colour sets remained quite rare. Thing is though, every time I encountered a colour set in those early days of the full colour experience, something was never quite right and I would leave the encounter fundamentally unimpressed by this technological breakthrough. The thing is see, those retired couples had paid out a fortune for their sets, they’d given up one of those cruises they seem to be perennially preparing for or maybe forgone the planned patio extension or conservatory.  As a consequence they wanted value for their money and that meant if the television was going to be in colour there was going to be lots of it, so the colour and contrast controls would be turned up to their maximum value or close to it. I’m not kidding either, this particular preference  was almost universal amongst those with early colour television sets.

After a while I cottoned on that is was the controls that were mal aligned and not a fundamental flaw in the technology as I had previously thought. So I would try and remedy the situation and point out that if the colour control was adjusted, that we would no longer need to wear sun glasses while watching the telly. This advice was universally met with aghast disbelief and derision accompanied with worlds like: ‘It’s so dull… muddy… there’s no colour’. What this tale illustrates is that colour is or the views on what colours are correct or most pleasing are subject to some—disagreement. Professionals who work with colour, spend a lot of time gauging their colour rendering and endlessly fussing over details in an effort to get it just right and yet aberrations like Man of Steel still occur. So it’s no surprise that Joe Bloggs occasionally makes the odd goof while working on colour images. I myself look at some of the images I’ve coloured and spot that I generally make the blacks too dense and the blue and reds too saturated.  When it comes to electronically scanned comics these flaws in colour reproduction are quite common, sometimes they’re manifested so intrusively they completely ruin the reading experience.

 

Such and example would be the nex t page taken from Warren’s Eerie 55:

Ugh.

 

 

Ah much better

 

As you see I applied some colour shifting over the colour gamut, to moderate the colours and I think it works quite well. The next image though is also a bit too saturated, although because the tones are more even, it’s not quite so revolting.

See?

 

When I attempt to adjust the colour though, it doesn’t seem to work too well, it’s looking a little too pasty to my mind.

 

Too pasty

 

Perhaps if I just try to moderate the reds that would work. 

 

 

Mm--not convinced

 

 

Yay! More fun.

There are two duck hunters Bob and Ted and they compete between themselves and the other members of the Selsey Duck Hunting Association for the prize of Best Duck Hunter. The prize awards skill rather with a gun rather than total kill count so it is awarded on the kill rate, that is the number of ducks killed divided by the number of shots fired: ducks/shots. So if hunter A, kills 50 ducks for 100 shots and hunter B, kills 70 ducks for 200 shots, hunter A wins because 50/100 is greater than 70/200, simple yeah?

Well look at Bob and Ted's ducks/shots stats over the last four years

Year	Bob ducks/shots	Ted ducks/shots
1	70/100	69/100
2	126/350	85/250
3	75/100	70/100
4	100/300	65/200

It might surprise you to learn that Ted has consistently been awarded the prize of Best Duck Hunter. How is it possible for Ted to have won all the awards for best duck hunter over the period covered by these statistics?

You can award yourself points through the following guidelines:-

Spotted the answer instantly: congratulations you're a genius -- 10 points.

Scratched my head for, no more than a minute and a half, then the light dawned: still pretty smart, perhaps you're just a bit slow today -- 5 points.

Did the sums in my head, worked it out after an hour or so: we're still good, it's just that you'll never be a rocket scientist -- 3 points.

It's been a day and half and my head hurts but I got it in the end: don't worry about it too much, you can tie your own laces can't you? -- 2 points.

I used all the battery power on my calculator and/or created a spreadsheet, mulled the puzzle over every night for week until it got so bad the misses threatened to take off with the kids then finally after days of woe and agony I realised the answer was staring me in the face all the time: there there, perhaps it's time for your nap now -- 1 point.

What's a duck? Oh dear, you know when people all seem to be talking really slowly to you... -- 0 points.

Looked the answer up on the internet: get lost you're beneath contempt -- -infinity points which by the way, means you can never score.

This is easy the answer is, ducks are cute, and futher more I can't prove it with... [edited] ...so there: oh hi, while indeed it's true many people find ducks to be cute, I find this answer to be somewhat wanting. Though the good news is that you do win a prize, it's a special prize, nice and shiny just for you and everyone else who's -- special.