Double dipping? Yet again!1 What was wrong with the OLD picture of Bill Haley, the leader of the early Rock group, the Comets? After all, the first picture - although it was just black and white - seemed fine for illustrating a bit about how Bill Haley became one of the icons and even a founder of Rock and Roll. (For the original essay, just click here.)
Footnote
The Tempest, Act I, Scene I, William Shakespeare, First Folio, Edward Blount and Isaac Jaggard (Editors and Publishers), 1623.
Of course, there's nothing wrong with the new picture - in principle, mind you. But the other drawing was entirely done with old technology suited for illustrating events from the 1950's. That is, with pencil, paper, and pen and ink. Only after the picture was completed was it rendered digitally. So what you got is what you drew.
This new drawing - although relying heavily on the original from the "old technology" - is a product of the computer age. Not just the coloring but the "inking". Despite what may be taken as a given, the actual making of a line drawing is not necessarily quicker with an electronic brain (as they were called in the olden days). Coloring, though, is generally much quicker and the big plus is that corrections are usually easier and faster.
There's nothing that changes art like new technology, and digital art produced notable changes in style compared to the comic art of the Golden Age which had spanned from the late 1930's into the 1950's. With the proper software, the digital approach eliminates the need for the once ubiquitous straight edges and drafting curves, the latter accessories usually being the static "French" curves or the flexible splines. So smooth lines and curves are quickly rendered.
But perhaps the major advantage of the computer is it allows the artist to get away from the old "work large then reduce" rule that has dominated edition art since the earliest days of engraving. A small pencil sketch zipped out on a piece of 8½" X 11" printer paper2 can easily serve as the template for final artwork that can be expanded for a crisply printed 3' X 4' poster3 (or larger). So all in all the digital approach not only saves time but also space as you don't have huge drawings laying about or stuck off somewhere in massive 25 X 37 folios.
Footnote
Originally printer paper was called "typewriter paper" since it was first used for those non-electronic, mechanical devices that ended up making the clerk copyist obsolete. There may be subtle differences between the two papers, but usually if it can run through a modern printer, it can be used in a typewriter.
The first practical typewriters were sold in the early 1870's and the machine was a staple of businesses until the mid-1980's when computers began to push them aside. By 1990, the computer was king and the clacka-clacka-clacka-CHING sound vanished from the workplace forever.
By the mid-20th century, the rattle of the typewriter had become such a part of modern culture that it was even incorporated into music. In 1950, American composer Leroy Anderson wrote The Typewriter - often called The Typewriter Concerto - where a typewriter is both a percussion instrument and the lead. Because of the concerto's rapid tempo, a specially prepared typewriter is required to prevent jamming - it has only two working keys - and the "typewriter virtuoso" has to be a professional percussionist.
The typewriter and its sound are also featured in the song "A Secretary is Not a Toy" in the 1961 Broadway musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. The musical actually won two Tony Awards and the 1962 Pulitzer Prize for Drama - although it's a comedy and a musical. Despite its somewhat dated plot and setting - the lyrics also have reference to shorthand dictation - there have been revivals in the new Millennium.
Footnote
A preferable format for making large printable artwork from a small sketch is scalable vector graphics - or SVG - with the files usually recognizable by the .svg suffix. An SVG file produces the drawing directly from equations which can be automatically expanded in the computer and so the high resolution is maintained. However, as the images become more complex the SVG file size increases, outstripping the bytes of the common bitmap images. In such cases the more traditional, JPEG (or JPG, Joint Photographic Experts Group), GIF (Graphics Interchange Format), or PNG (Portable Network Graphics) files tend to be less massive. A good compromise is to keep the original SVG file on hand but convert a copy to a bitmap at the right resolution for printing or display. The picture of Bill you see above is a GIF file created from an SVG line drawing.
Because the SVG file is actually a text file, it can be incorporated directly into the web page. But if the image is to be used on multiple pages the separate file is more memory efficient.
It may seem unnecessary to point it out, but the name "Bill Haley and His Comets" comes from a play on words of the famous comet that returns every 75 years. In fact, the first recording with the new group was labeled "Bill Haley and His Haley Comets". The last visit of the comet - nowadays spelled with two "l's" and properly pronounced "HĂ-lee"- to the inner Solar System was in late 1985 and early 1986. Its return, though, was pretty much of a bust, and most people never saw it.
Of course, everyone knows that Mark Twain came in and went out with Halley's Comet. You'll even read that in 1909 he wrote:
"I came in with Halley's comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.' Oh! I am looking forward to that."
And indeed Sam did go out with Halley's Comet.
One difficulty for the aspiring Twain scholar is finding where the hey the primary source of Sam's4 statement comes from. A perusal of his letters (even with fancy digital searching) finds little mention - or perhaps "no" is a better word - of Halley's Comet.
Instead, you have to wait two years after Sam died to find the quote. It's in the biography by Albert Bigelow Paine published in 1912. Albert gives the entire quote from what appears to be his memory of a conversation, not from correspondence. He said that when talking about astronomy that "by and by" Sam made the amazingly prescient statement. Predictions are certainly the most accurate if given after the event.
References
"Bill Haley and His Comets", Discogs.
"Introduction to Vectors - Mathematics of Vector Art", Interactive Mathematics.
Mark Twain: A Biography - The Personal and Literary Life of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, Albert Bigelow Paine, Harper and Brothers, 1912.