On Scarpa

Eta Beta eega at supereva.it
Fri Aug 22 12:17:09 CEST 2003


People wondered, recently, what's so good about Romano Scarpa's
art.

I couldn't join that interesting thread for lack of time, mostly
the time to read all the messages, but here's a piece of my mind,
worth the usual 2 cents, on the matter with practical examples :

If the question of the worthiness of Scarpa as an artist comes
after viewing "The Big Break In" in US 320, it is, imho, perfectly
justified.

Between his golden years '50-60s and the '80s "renaissance",
Scarpa did a lot of very "average" jobs, I suspect with not
much enthusiasm, with the "Studio" S-coded stories being the
lowest dip, both story and art-wise.

In this specific story the line art appears to be even somewhat
"mangled", I thought it must have been some technical problem
in the Gemstone reprint at first but no, I fished out the original
italian publication and it looks only slightly better because
the b&w pages and the less-covering ink in the colour ones
allow the thin, half-cancelled lines to show better than in the
Gemstone's "thick-coloured" print, but it's still nasty.


This is definitely not the kind of story that could gain Romano
Scarpa new fans, imho, it's strictly for die-hard ones like
yours truly... ;-)


Also, it's difficult to gain Scarpa new fans when his stories
are often miscredited to Giorgio Cavazzano.

Here's the current german Donald Duck :

S 67145 - The Sunken City
story/zeichnungen : Romano Scarpa, Giorgio Cavazzano

precise credit is

story : unknown
art   : Romano Scarpa
ink   : Giorgio Cavazzano

Cavazzano was still apprenticing at Scarpa's at the time, it's
sure fair enough to credit him for partecipating to the creation
of this story, but I suspect he's credited more prominently
than he deserved, here, just because he's a big name now...

And here we only have a printed credit that is just "vague",
but Scarpa's stories have been plain wrongly credited to Cavazzano
several times in the past.

Indeed, errors were mostly bona fide, it was objectively difficult
to tell Scarpa from Cavazzano in the early to mid '70s, but it was
Cavazzano's style at the time that mimicked Scarpa, not the other
way 'round. And that was only natural, what with Cavazzano having
been Scarpa's "pupil" for some 10 years...


So, since this is still about what Gemstone should publish in
order to give Scarpa a better chance on the american market, the
recommendation is again the same, boring one, I'm afraid...

Go for the "classic" 1955-1965 stuff. While I join the chorus
of people maintaining that Scarpa's mouse is generally better than
his ducks, there's still a lot of gems where the lentils came
from, and I don't mean Babylon... ;-)

One story I believe could make a nice Big Break-In :-) is for
instance "Columbus' Butterfly" (I TL  327-A +)


Cheers!

Eta Beta


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