From September 13th 1954 until 31 December 1954 Bob De Moor saw his Snoe en Snolleke album “De Gele Spion” published in ‘t Vrije Volksblad, Nieuws van de dag, De Nieuwe Gids and De Antwerpse Gids. Later on in the 80s he was asked to rework the album for a publication in color. Since Catawiki has right now an original drawing up for auction from this specific album we thought it might be the perfect opportunity to see the corrections that were added on that item in order to re-release the album in color.

The complete page being auctioned this week is the one holding the strips 177 till 180 (that is page 47 in the Bedescope and Boogaloo versions for the French speaking).

For the publication in color in the eighties Bob De Moor, assisted by Geert De Sutter, reworked the material in order to remove the black parts in the drawings. As a result this page on auction has many white spots where the duo removed the black (in other parts of the album black parts were also replaced by drawings and not just removed, especially when it were characters or parts of the decor).

Here you see a detail which very well represents the differences. In the middle you see the original drawing from 1954 (albeit with a French text – note also the not so excellent way the original Dutch text was removed and replaced by a french text), on the left you have the corrected version from the 80s where the black spot has been whitened, on the right you have the colored version, with an adapted French text, this time with decent lettering.

In connection with this, there was also a page auctioned a while back from the same album, but this one had all the black parts still intact. A fake one? Not really, in fact this page had been restored to the old version (and quite well executed too) based on the version as published in 1954. You can see that restored page on the left. You’ll see that the original/restored version in black and white is a lot more balanced than the black and white version used for the colored albums. Not so weird because it was meant to be in black and white originally.