New Volume of Sky Masters of the Space Force

I have recently obtained a copy of “Sky Masters of the Space Force” Libro 1. This is the first of what should become a three volume set. The restoration of the newspaper strips were made by Ferran Delgado, who has his own blog. I am of the habit of periodically visiting his blog just to look at the beautiful images of comic art that he provides. Unfortunately I have a serious problem with his blog and this “Sky Masters” book as well, no hablo Espanol. I took three years of Spanish in high school but I am afraid I passed only because I was the quietest person in the class.

Still I am particularly looking forward to the volume containing the Sky Master Sunday strips. Ferran has posted some of his restorations and one of them has also appeared in Mark Evanier’s “Jack Kirby: King of Comics”. These restorations are nothing short of drop dead gorgeous. Ferran is taking great care to faithfully restore the original colors of the printed version. Readers of my blog should not be surprised to find that I feel recoloring was one of the greatest banes of earlier reprints of material drawn by Jack Kirby. This particularly egregious in the case of Sky Master because there is every reason to believe that Kirby did the original color guides himself. It is much more likely that work done for the Sky Master in the late fifties could lead an understanding of the true nature of Kirby Kolors then any of the work that Jack did in the ’80s or ’90s.

So congratulations to Ferran Delgado for successfully bringing the first volume of Sky Masters to print. I know it required a lot of work, but the result certainly justifies the effort.

6 thoughts on “New Volume of Sky Masters of the Space Force

  1. Ferran Delgado

    Thanks for your kind words, Harry.

    If this project is becoming a reality is in part thanks to you and your Yahoo Group Digitizing Comics, because it showed me the path to follow.

    You also provided me some scans of the printed sundays, which it was essential for me to realize that I could embody this project. And your support was/is also very welcome!

    BTW, the second book is scheduled to 2009, and the third to 2010. I’m doing this project combined with my regular workload, so its progress is slow. Anyway, I use all this time to gather more stuff for the extras section of the third book, like 10 original color guides of the sundays strips done by Kirby himself.

    My dream would be that, once all the books are finished, this edition would be published internationaly in collaboration with the Kirby Museum and Greg Theakston, and this would include USA. I wish Marvel could publish it via his label Icon! Anyway, there’s lots of work till then, so let’s go step-by-step… You’ll learn about the progress of the book in my blog. Thanks for your interest!

  2. Harry Post author

    Ferran,

    How about that, I have the same dream you have! That is to have your work on Sky Masters published in English. Although I am not sure why Marvel would have to be involved. No reason why they should not be either.

  3. Ferran Delgado

    I thought about Marvel because they have the Icon label which allows to keep the copyright to the artist, and also, the book would have a greater impact with them rather than with a small publisher like Pure Imagination.

    It also looks like there’s a good relationship with Marvel and the Kirby Estate, after Marvel publishing Kirby’s Galactic Bounty Hunters and The Lost FF story.

    Anyway, this is only my vision from outside. Since all of this should be done coordinated with Greg and the Kirby Estate, probably they could provide more realistic proposals from their experience.

    But since the ultimate goal is to divulgue this masterworks as much as possible, I think that Marvel could be more useful than PI or TwoMorrows.

  4. Masekela Polee

    Whatever happened to this project? Did it get cancelled? I very much was looking forward to the remastered Sky Masters in English.

  5. Harry Post author

    I am a little puzzled by your question. The Sky Masters post was about the Spanish language version, not an English one. So far two volumes of the Spanish volumes have come out but I have no idea if or when the last one would come out. Ferran did a fantastic restoration job. Much better than any that preceeded his version in any language. I would dearly love to see an English version of his work.

  6. Masekela Polee

    I’d dearly would love to see this version in english too, which is why I asked. And the only reason why I asked is because in the comments Ferran himself said he’d like to see it released internationally.

    Although, given the quality of the restoration from what I’ve seen, I’d try and read it with my broken Spanish if I have to because it is leaps and bounds so much better than the copy that I have that was released in the 90s.

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