What Makes You a Man
September 3, 2024
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So apparently Niklas Edlund was going to work with the late comic artist Barry Blair, who has the series Elflord. I've asked some others and they had no idea about this potential collaboration. I found this announcement in the old site files:
And then the explanation that it will no longer happen:
I looked into Elflord, and while not outright lewd, it is pretty suggestive... much more than any of Niklas's comics. Would have been interesting to see them work together though! That is a VERY cute elf boy.
Elflord and other related comics could be FAR MORE than suggestive or even "lewd"…
This Kit Kittenvale series was indeed cute and sweet (if anatomically detailed), and had some relation with Niklas and friends.
I was totally unaware it has been planned to end at Niklas'. This is a good piece of history you dug out!
Now, being a long-time fan of Elflord and Barry's works, I happened to BUY ALL the 24 pages Barry drew for this series!!! Originals, paper and pencils.
Unfinished save for the cover, just pencilled. I scanned them and had them inked and coloured by a good artist. The result is worth the trouble.
Here is a sample page, from the original pencils to the inks and coloured final:
Whoa that's really nice! Would be nice to see the whole thing. When looking online and getting his older site archives, it mostly seemed to be woman on boy. I downloaded some Elflord comics and didn't see much that appealed to me. What is the Kit Kittenvale series? Is it an arc in Elflord? Also, wouldn't it be rather adult if he did team up with Niklas? It's all quite interesting.
Sure I'll post it all! In this thread?
As for the woman/boy, at some point Barry had to turn to commercial/mainstream subjects… women.
But not forgetting his faithful customer base, he kept the boys 😏
Sometimes it is clearly an afterthought, such as the Children of the Night series, where the covers are… "mainstream"
but the inside is much more interesting! Check a few pages: Children Of The Night
>What is the Kit Kittenvale series
It is the ONE 24-page comics with Kit, planned for Niklas. The background of the "Explanation" pic you posted is the cover for it. Which is why I could tell this was intended for Niklas 😊
>wouldn't it be rather adult
Can't tell what he had in mind for the plot. This one comics remains on the "safe" side.
I did some more scouring the net and found these amazing boy pics he did... these wouldn't be all that I saw as these were the tamest lol.
Note: The quality of these jpegs were terrible so I ran them through Topaz Photo and cleaned up the compression artifacts and increased the resolution.
And some more <3
Great (typically tame) stuff for sure…
The last one is of my long-time favourites 🤩
Btw, I have been collecting Barry's works since THIRTY years. The (sorted) collection contains over 16400 pics…
Starting it here. This page was coloured by Barry.
Kit Kittenvale page 02
You can see the drop in details in the coloring… Barry's hand painting vs computer graphics…
Not bad, anyway 🙂
The text is poorly scribbled, not always possible to decipher it. I added what I could guess.
Page 03
This one I could not get… eBay auctions… sometimes strong competition.
So I just got the lower-res promo scan -whited out as you can see-
No way to decipher the text.
Page 04
The original pencils are notably more elegant…
The reference to "Bai Mao" (and the human guard with round ears) shows the Kit Kittenvale series was planned to run in context with the Warp Elflord V2 and Legend of the Elflord series. Pretty obvious anyway, with the WARP-branded paper!
Page 05
Page 06
Cute 🙂
Page 07
Some undecipherable text…
Page 08
As always with Barry, we can "see" where this is heading 🤨
Hi, my name is Niklas. I’m the one to the left with the blond hair and those goofy freckles. I’ll tell you in some cartoons and stories what happened after I told my best friends the truth. You should know, I love my friends, really! And guess what some of them, like Fabian and Jason, love me too! I always thought they’d say I’m weird, well, maybe we’re all weird.