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Mr. and Mrs. Lodge

Started by ASS-P, July 09, 2016, 10:03:17 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

ASS-P

When I was a kid stories almost never showed Mrs. Lodge .
  Really (I'm 56) ~ these 60s (reprinted in the 70s I guess more than as new ones)/70s stories made so little use of Mrs. Lodge that you could easily think that Mr. Lodge was one of the many widowed daddies that 1960s situation comedies (Brian Keith , Fred MacMurray...) so liked ~ I only - I THINK - remember one vintage story showing Mrs. Lodge and it was version considerably different from the " silver fox/stylish woman of a certain age " that the 00s comics showed !
  I recall this story showing Mr. Lodge , in a nostalgic mood , remembering his young married years , when he lived in a pretty basic apartment and was out of town (As a salesman ?) a lot of the time ~ He recalled the little Veronica rushing to meet him when he came back ! Mrs. Lodge was at home , of course , TC-ing of B .
  This was before Archie came up w/this concept of the Lodges always having been rich , and having come across to America on the Mayflower which I ran into again in a recent digest (However , I remember an Artie Andrews story showing a child Mr. Lodge moving to Riverdale at modest/perhaps - upperish ? - middle-class but aspiring level so who knows .) !
  IIRC , furthermore , this story showed a modern-day Mrs. Lodge - who was depicted as an overweight , rather empty-headed , society woman concerned with trivial stuff (the Margaret Dumont - Charlotte Greenwood ? - arche/sterotype) with the obvious implication?? that she and Mr. Lodge had rather grown apart over the years .

invisifan

The exact Lodge backstory never seems set in more than mud ... the Mrs.Lodge I recall from way back rarely appeared, but was over-weight, top-heavy carrying opera glasses and a snobby air ... and would have been mistaken for Ron's grandmother if not otherwise identified ...

DeCarlo Rules

Yeah, exactly as @invisifan described -- the old Mrs. Lodge (in her infrequent appearances) was generally depicted as the sort of upper-crust society matron type you'd typically see in the old Three Stooges comedy shorts -- that goes all the way back to her 1940s appearances, although since she so seldom appeared, her exact appearance varied considerably from story to story and artist to artist. In looking through a lot of inconsistencies between how minor characters were drawn in older stories, it seems like there were never any style guides or model sheets used by ACP to give the different artists any reference. Sometime in the late 1980s/early 1990s Hermione Lodge got a makeover and was modernized, and began appearing more frequently, as a regular supporting character in VERONICA.

DeCarlo Rules

All of this puts me into a frame of mind to think about the various inconsistencies in artistic depiction among the various artists working "assembly-line fashion" on the same characters in the comic book industry. Compared to the animation industry, which used the same assembly-line production methods employing a team of artists whose natural drawing style differed, comic books are just banged-out haphazardly -- anything to keep feeding the furnace of printing comic books and getting them into the hands of the readers on a regular and timely basis, and thus keep the profits flowing in for the publisher.

Comic books don't have the production planning and oversight that the animation industry has, where character reference guides showing all of the characters used in an animated film are routinely drawn up, showing that character in various poses and at different angles, in particular with reference to the head, showing how it should look from various angles and with different facial expressions. Often there would be a number of handwritten notes accompanying these model reference guides, detailing various do's and don'ts for drawing the characters. That was because there were several different animators working on any given film, and everything in the finished film needed to be consistent-looking and mesh seamlessly. Even though it was normally the case that one animator would be given the primary responsibility for a particular character, very few people are knowledgeable enough to be able to identify which artist drew which animated character just by looking at the film carefully.

I HAVE seen some of these character reference model sheets made for artists' reference in the comic book industry, but overall that's a very inconsistent practice. I think I've seen some drawn by the original Superman artist Joe Shuster, showing Superman, Lois Lane, Clark Kent made up to guide the artists working on Superman back in the 1940s when Shuster ran his own comics studio, where he hired a number of artists to meet the production demands for Superman comic stories once that character began to take off and Shuster couldn't possibly draw all the stories all by himself. Similarly, I've seen such model sheets featuring the same characters done sometime in the late 1960s or early 1970s by the then-main artist on Superman, Curt Swan.

In contrast to standard animation industry practices, in the comic book industry even in those cases where such model sheets were employed, they never bothered to account for EVERY new character that appeared in a story with those kind of reference model sheets. Why bother, when in the vast majority of cases, such reference would never be needed again? If there was a comic book artist who worked on a particular franchise, he could easily reproduce the likeness of a character he'd drawn before (and maybe even created the visual appearance of himself). There was no way to tell that any particular character might make another appearance, before the initial story had been drawn and printed. Of course, once they realized a character would be likely to appear again, they could have always gone back and created a model sheet for that character retroactively, but it seems to rarely have happened. It was just easier to hand a new artist an old comic for reference, but that was made more difficult for those characters whose appearances were random or infrequent, like Mrs. Lodge. Leroy Lodge might be another good example.

Going back to the Superman example, when Jack Kirby got hired away from Marvel by DC Comics, and began his stint there by taking over as the writer/artist on SUPERMAN'S PAL JIMMY OLSEN, the DC art editor looked at the resultant artwork and decided that Superman as drawn by Kirby looked entirely too inconsistent with the one being published in SUPERMAN and ACTION COMICS, and so artist Al Plastino was assigned to redraw the Superman heads which were then pasted over Kirby's original art, to make the character more consistent with the standard Superman style.

A similar type of occurrence happened (retroactively) when an old Jughead story featuring Jughead's Uncle Herman was reprinted in JUGHEAD & FRIENDS DIGEST. This happened after a new story had been written and drawn by Fernando Ruiz in that title, establishing Jughead's Uncle Herman and Bingo Wilkin's Uncle Herman as one and the same (thus establishing Bingo as Jughead's cousin, and justifying a continuing series of THAT WILKIN BOY reprints in the JUGHEAD & FRIENDS DIGEST). In the newly-reprinted version of the story, art alterations were made to the appearance of Jughead's Uncle Herman in the original artwork to make his face resemble that of Bingo Wilkin's Uncle Herman.

steveinthecity

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on July 10, 2016, 03:44:39 AM
Going back to the Superman example, when Jack Kirby got hired away from Marvel by DC Comics, and began his stint there by taking over as the writer/artist on SUPERMAN'S PAL JIMMY OLSEN, the DC art editor looked at the resultant artwork and decided that Superman as drawn by Kirby looked entirely too inconsistent with the one being published in SUPERMAN and ACTION COMICS, and so artist Al Plastino was assigned to redraw the Superman heads which were then pasted over Kirby's original art, to make the character more consistent with the standard Superman style.
Just a question for you or anyone else that may know, but I was of the belief that in addition to Al Plastino that Curt Swan and/or Murphy Anderson also had redrawn Superman's head in those 70's Jimmy Olsen comics.  Also that Anderson, Neal Adams, or Vince Colletta specifically inked just the head to make it more consistent with what DC wanted Superman to look like.  Has anyone seen other names connected to the redrawn Kirby heads(other than possibly Mike Royer)?
Comics!

BettyReggie

I have only seen her a few times. Whenever Veronica goes shopping in Paris her mom was there. I think she is in first issue of Veronica. Whenever the Lodges mansion was robbed she was there because she was worried that her jewelry was stolen. But she was in Life With Archie when her husband had a nervous breakdown & she had take over Lodge industries.

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