Monday 29 November 2010

BIG BAD WOLF IN CHILDRE'NS WALLPAPER DESIGN


Above scan is from a children's wallpaper currently being sold in an Istanbul bookshop. It was recently given as a gift to me by my brother -even though I don't have a child!

Tuesday 23 November 2010

BIG BAD WOLF IN INTERIOR COVER DESIGNS


Above scan is of the interiors of the front and back covers of the first 8 books from the 'Renkli Çocuk Kitapları' series published by Turkey's Arkın Kitabevi in 1966. When we were kids, me and my brother had savored these books via their reprints in the 1970s and one of my first, if not the first, exposure to the Big Bad Wolf was from these interior cover designs, hence the placement of the BBW illustration from it in the masthead of this blog!
When Arkın published a further 8 books from this series in 1967, the design of the interiors of the covers changed, but the BBW was featured in two of the total four new designs:



If anyone has seen these illustrations elsewhere and/or has any hint/info on their origial source, PLEASE let me know!!...

GYRO VERSUS THE BIG BAD WOLF


As noted in yesterday's post in this blog, the Big Bad Wolf had made a small appearance in one of the booklets, featuring Gyro Gearloose, of an illustrated story book series from Germany. Above scan is of the page in which the wolf appears from the Turkish edition titled Arşimet'in Buluşları [The Inventions of Gyro Gearloose], published in 1967 as no. 16 of Arkın Kitabevi's 'Renkli Çocuk Kitapları' series. The episode with the Big Bad Wolf involves Gyro catching the wolf who had seaked into the inventor's laboratory.

Monday 22 November 2010

GERMAN ILLUSTRATED STORY BOOKLET ADAPTATION OF BIG BAD WOLF COMICS


As a kid, I was especially delighted to see this Big Bad Wolf booklet, among other Disney booklets from the same series, in an Istanbul bookshop selling foreign books and had immediately bought them (or had my parents buy for me!) even though I couldn't read German... That was probably sometime in the mid-1970s. Now, I have discovered that it was derived from an American comics, published in no. 394 (dated July 1973) of Walt Disney's Comics & Stories, with art by Phil DeLara. Below are scans of the whole book and the comics it was derived from:










The no. 10 of Pestalozzi-Verlag's 'Walt Disney's Micky Maus Buch' series features the Three Little Pigs and is titled Die 3 kleinen Schweinchen und der böse Wolf (first published in 1965), but I don't have that one. No. 19, titled Der kleine Wolf, features the Li'l Wolf, but the Big Bad Wolf doesn't appear. On the other had, he makes a small appearance in no. 21 titled Daniel Düsentrieb from 1967, featuring Gyro Gearloose.
Pestalozzi-Verlag had started its 'Walt Disney's Micky Maus Buch' series in 1964, taking over from Bluchert Verlag's series with the identical series title and format from circa 1961-62. The initial books from Pestolazzi were reprints from Bluchert, but eventually they added new entries, such as this one. Not all stories in the series are derived from comics, some are German editions of US illustrated story books from the 1950s and most are of (yet-)unidentified origin. The series also had a British edition in the 1960s by Purnell and a French edition in the same decade by Hachette ("mini livre" series). The Turkish edition by Arkın Kitabevi from 1966-67 was of a larger and taller format than all the rest, some of the stories were also serialized in Arkın's short-lived Renkli Miki weekly comics magazine from 1966.