James Edgar's and Tony Weare's Matt Marriott - Coda

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Images:

1. newspaper clippings glued by Tony Weare in a scrapbook: "Belle Benson's Daughter"'s two first strips (1956);

2. Tony Weare's drawing style would get looser in time; it was a nice mix of impressionism, hatchings, cross-hatchings, anatomical and emotional accuracy (looseness and preciseness): panels from strip ten of "The Territory," I think; early seventies (original art);

3. a rare one panel strip in what is, in my opinion, the series' best story: "A Man Called Shannon" ("Tragedy on the plain" - 29 - as it was published in Camillo Conti's Matt Marriott: November 1978 [1965]);

4. Matt Marriott's stand against manichaeism: "Gospel Mary," last panel of strip seventy three as it was published in Mundo de Aventuras Especial # 12 (October 1976 [1973]): "-It is a confusing world, with good people and bad people. When money is involved most good people become bad people!..." Shadows and light underline the characters’ words;

5. in a great essay about Superman, Umberto Eco noticed how strange time in a series is (it's a compromise between the frozen time of myth and the consuming time of fiction; he called it the iterative scheme: from an adventure to the next it's as if nothing happened before: it's a continuous of successive beginnings); in this image, dated 1989, Tony Weare gets a revenge against said limitation (published in Ark magazine # 31, undated, c. 1990);

6. Tony Weare: "I eventually developed a technique of my own when I did Matt Marriott (1955 - 1977). I wouldn't draw the outlines of objects and people but would have two different shades meet." (Ark # 31: 45.); "Rookwood" by William Ainsworth and Tony Weare: Look and Learn # 961 (August 9, 1980).