I like the way he placed the main illustration in the center of the image and flowed the images for the 7 Ages of women around the outer border to work with the text. With 7 Ages, Outcault didn’t use any frames or cameos in the image. The blue line that creates the frame around the center image was put there by the colorist, the original ink drawing didn’t have a border. Much like Millionaire and a lot of the very first episodes of Mose the colorist of the time used colors almost as spot colors. They didn’t try to create a lot of complicated background blends mostly just a lot of single colors on a white background. I think they might have been doing it the same way I am, figuring it out a little at a time. Later on they became quite proficient at screens and blends, though they always seem to have a lot of problems with areas with small details. Also the text balloons were something new and they weren’t sure how to treat them. In most Mose images they just flowed color through the balloon instead of leaving it white as is done today. You missed a lot of Mose when you can’t read the text in the balloons.

By the time Outcault was done experimenting with Pore Lil Mose and began drawing Buster Brown, he had pretty well defined how modern comics are done. He had gone from The Yellow Kid which mostly used a single frame image, no text balloons and a lot of supporting text to tell the story, to Buster which used text balloons and multiple frames to tell the story. With Buster he had refined the modern technique of laying out frames from left to right and down, with Mose you can see he tried many combinations.

My reason for choosing 7 Ages as the next to be remastered was like Ef I Wuz Millionaire it is one of the simpler Mose images. It also contained a night scene in The Lover and I knew I needed to figure out the technique for illustrating a night scene before I could move on to the more complicated night scenes in Ghost Story and the more complicated one in Talks to the Animals. My reasoning was if I can then figure out Talks to the Animals, I should be able to do any of the other night scenes that appear in several other Mose episodes.

By the way, everyone at the studio has fallen in love with the three little girls on the left side of the image. We liked the girls so much we have blowups of each of them hanging on the walls of the studio.

With 7 Ages I was just beginning to understand what I could and could not do to enrich the coloring in both style and technique. I also began to get a feel as to how Outcault used his pens. He has a very fluid style that at times I can start an area and move my hand, wrist and electronic pen so that it’s a very natural logical motion and duplicate his pen strokes in an area almost exactly, in one fluid motion. During the inking of 7 Ages I also added a couple more styles of digital pens and brushes to better duplicate Outcault’s pen style.

My biggest problem making images created with digital tools look like they were created with mechanical tools is the fact digital tools don’t like to draw curved lines. A curve created with a digital brush is not really a curve it’s created by using square pixels. So Its not really a curve but a lot of small straight lines one slightly offset from the next. The pixels and offsets of the pixels are so small they appear to the eye as a continuous curve.

This is a major problem when doing a project like Mose. Even though I have some very high-end computer equipment and software, it has its limitations. I might have the right tool, at the right size and my hand positioned correctly to recreate part of a drawing and when I proceed the speed in which I have to move my hand to duplicate the flow of Outcault’s style is too fast for the system. You can create the flow of the curves but you have to slow your hand down enough so the computer can keep up. The down side is that you can no longer duplicate the flow of Outcault’s lines. What ends up happening is you get as close as you can and then come back and reshape and refine the lines almost on a pixel level using the eraser and a one or two pixel brush.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
As You Like It

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel,
And shining morning face, creeping like a snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then the soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lin’d,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well sav’d a world to wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.