ON MY WAY TO STOCKHOLM

Since nothing is perfect in life, there are always things that will go wrong. 1989-1990, I can’t remember exactly. Everything was smooth. I had plenty of work and a great relation with my publishers for whom I was working exclusively: SEMIC PRESS. It was so good they improved my income without me ever asking. And then the problems with my agent started. My idea of what she deserved for the mediation and management wasn’t what she expected and we part ways. After threatening me with taking my job, I got a plane and flew to my publisher headquarters in Stockholm. There we decided to keep working together without the intercession of any agent, directly and, to be honest, the relation got much better, fluent, warmer and closer.
After that experience I do not fear to say that the intercession of any agent may be a dead weight for the artist-publisher relationship. The agents and studios I know in Barcelona (Spain) deserve a post themselves. I’ll talk about them some day.
From this new period and thanks to the more fluent communications, the possibility of adapting for comic the animation classics of Tom and Jerry presented itself. I was excited with the idea since they talked about adapting the best batch of stories of the characters in my opinion. I made some adaptations, I can’t remember all the names (I’m getting old): “Jerry’s Cousin”, “The Bodyguard”, “Little Runaway”, “Kitty Foiled”, “The Cat and The Mermouse”, “The Dog House”…
One of the new things that came with that period was that the stories changed from four strips per page to three strips; a big improvement in my opinion. Four strips lead to very small art for the comic-book format and texts occupy too much space inside the composition of the scenes. Three strips of panel, instead, allow for better composition and, due to more square panels, made the adaptations of animation to comic easier because it was more or less the same space you would see on the screen.
Since then, all the pages have consisted of three rows of panels. This story I post today is the first one to be drawn in that way, and it’s the adaptation of the shortcut “Jerry and the Lion”. You can compare and evaluate the job I did that time. The color is awful! The publishers couldn’t deal worse with the color.