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| RITCHIE RETCH from CRAZY #69 |
Where shall I start? The cover is so chock full of sight gags! I knew immediately what the premise of the story was just by looking at the cover. See, anyone of a certain age who grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area would know the 1974 Patty Hearst kidnapping story very well. For any youngsters reading this, or people who grew up somewhere else or under a rock, go ahead and read Wikipedia for context. But for those of us who already knew the details of the SLA and Patty Hearst story, this Richie Rich parody is such a laff-riot that I couldn't even breathe!
Starting with the series logo in the upper left corner. This "Ritchie" abuses minority workers- cracking a whip over Mexican, Chinese and West Indies peons. The Harvey logo was replaced with "Horrid World". On the main cover splash page, Alt-Ritchie poses with a machine gun in a squalid rat infested hovel, with alt-Freckles and alt-Pee Wee as fellow revolutionaries. It's not quite obvious who the girl is, but it would be hilarious if that was Mayda Munny. One of the rats has his fist raised in a "Fight Da Power" salute. The furniture is wrecked, and the floor is littered with matches, cigarette butts, knives, bombs and sacks of money. Alt-Pee Wee, like any toddler, happily plays on the floor with a ball, which is, in this case... a bomb.
Best thing... the revolutionary logo painted on a bedsheet behind them- almost a dead-ringer for the cobra logo of the Symbionese Liberation Army.
Now, getting to the story. It's titled "Ritchie Retch in Enemy of the Working Class". Alt-Ritchie's minority workers can't stand him, so they watch indifferently while he's kidnapped by left wing radicals alt-Reggie Van Dough, alt-Freckles and alt-Pee Wee. In their run-down terrorist HQ, the kidnappers kick alt-Ritchie into a closet and demand that his father organize a food giveaway for the poor. This is actually a pretty accurate reckoning of the Patty Hearst kidnapping.
Alt-Mr. Rich and his staff reluctantly do a food drop- consisting of high class foods like pheasant, Perrier water, caviar, tea cakes, pastry bags, spice racks, truffles and mints. That had me in stitches, because in real life, such items are sold these days at the high-end farmer's market and shops at the Ferry Bldg in San Francisco.
Alt-Ritchie is picked up by his father, who bribes a judge into sentencing his wayward boy to two weeks at a country-club minimum security prison, where the cells are decorated with modern art, thick shag carpeting, entertainment systems and luxury food and drink stored in spotless stainless steel servers. This reflects many a kitchen table discussion across America about Patty Hearst, who some said was a "poor little rich girl who got off easy".
He is visited by the only survivor of the bombing raid, alt-Freckles, who demands one million dollars, or else he'll kill alt-Ritchie. At the time (1980), one million dollars was still a lot of money. Alt-Mr. Rich arranges for a bodyguard for alt-Ritchie once he's released, and it turns out to be Gloria! Alt-Ritchie proposes marriage and Alt-Gloria gladly accepts, plotting to arrange a fatal accident so she can have all his money. All of this is deliciously ironic, because Patty Hearst wed her bodyguard after being released from prison.
At the wedding party, alt-Freckles dashes out from hiding under the buffet table, and attempts to shoot alt-Ritchie with a machine gun. Alt-Ritchie shoves alt-Gloria into the spray of bullets, killing her instead of himself. Alt-Freckles is dragged off by the police, while alt-Ritchie resumes his hobby of clubbing baby seals to death.
Wow... a lot happened in a 5 page story. Kudos to the writer (Jim Owsley) and the artists (Howard Bender and Marie Severin) for coming up with something this good. Bender and Severin had mastered the Harvey house style, and their depictions of Richie, Mr. Rich, Freckles, Pee Wee, Reggie and Gloria were almost perfect. They purposely went subtly off-model, probably to avoid IP disputes with Harvey Comics.
Satire and parody are so much more effective when based on real-life events, and boy, this story is incredible- taking a real story and raising it to the n'th degree, with suitably hilarious results. It's just kind of a shame that younger adults and kids today would not be able to catch all of the references and appreciate how well done this all is.
I just felt that alt-Reggie and alt-Mayda Munny got the short straws in this story and were criminally underutilized. Mayda, in particular, deserved more than the "helpless girl" look on the parody cover. So I drew Reggie and Mayda in a special pin-up as radicals! With Mayda and the familiar mad-eyebrows and smirk that we all know and hate! Yes, this is my artwork. I wish I could draw like John and Marie Severin, or Don Rosa, or Ernie Colon.
These days, we have Adobe Photoshop to handle the inking and coloring chores, so if we make a mistake, a quick digital eraser removes any errors- forever! My artwork starts off as a pencil sketch on a drawing pad. The sketches don't need to be too tight, because Photoshop inking covers it all up. The background layer is the scanned original sketch. Then, I add a transparent layer for the Photoshop inking. I use a Wacom pen and tablet- I only use a mouse to play video games.
Once the digital inking looks ok, I place an opaque white layer between the pencil sketch and the inks to basically block out the pencils. Then I start adding color transparent layers. Each color has its own layer, and each is set to "multiply" so I can see the layers below them. I don't need to aim the colors too well, since the inked outlines remain intact, no matter how badly I color. Oh, BTW, drawing guns is not my specialty, so the guns were drawn on a separate layer (based on a 4" toy MEGO rifle) and merged into the ink layer once I had it right.
The final layer is a "shadow" layer- a transparent gray. Finally, when everything looks good, I merge all of the layers and save as a .JPG file.
