Strange Tales Indeed

Strange Tales no. 181-Starlin's Ditko homage! "1000 Clowns" is Starlin at his most completely wacked. There's the clowns, of course, Gamora(wow!) and Pip the Troll, but if that's not enough there's pie throwing--and it sure looks like Roy Thomas getting the pie in the face--and Warlock in full clown drag, including the red rubber nose, which was a really good look for him, believe it or not. At the end of this ish, having faced the Madness Monster within himself, Adam Warlock admits to being insane, which is always a good finish for a superhero comic. All in all, a classic, and as I look back on it, a formative influence on me. (Just check out my book "fandancer" to see what I'm talking about.)

For such a cosmic guy, Starlin loved to draw earthy, taught bodies with lots of rippling musculature.  You'd imagine something more ethereal for cosmic space opera, but Starlin's stylizations were and are perfect for these explorations of outer and inner space--they somehow endow these cosmic psycho-dramas with the necessary weight and terra-firma, so that they seem tangible, when it'd be all too easy for them to float off like the fluff of dreams.
Strange Tales no.181 is another of JS's fallen figure compositions, and the first Warlock cover I drew for this little project. I drew it quickly-- basically, I just wanted to see if I could draw Warlock upside down--and colored it just as quickly. Another of the Uniroyal ball point pen drawings--that pen encouraged a real loose, gestural approach. It was never meant to be more than a sketch, a momentary diversion while waiting for ol' Saint Nick and watching the snowfall. (Saint Nick has come and gone, but that snow doesn't know when to stop!)

Jimmy Olsen no.115 by Neal Adams

This is one of those covers, like so many Neal Adams did for DC in the late sixties, that far surpasses the contents of the package. The story inside has none of the drama this image promises, nor anything approximating the bold flavor of Neal Adams' artwork. Still, the cover alone is well worth the 12 cents.  It's one of my favorites from Neal Adams' sixties work, primarily, I think because of the rich coloring, which he may or may not have had anything to do with. The image itself, simple,clean and spare, allows for the bold color to do its thing--and it was indeed, a seductive object-commanding my attention amidst all the competition on the spinner rack back in 1968.
In many ways, it encapsulates that which attracts me to comics, to art-to this day--the joyous flat color, the simplicity of its spare but powerful arrangement of forms and figures. It speaks to the power of color in comics-and color rarely gets its due, it seems to me, when talking about comics art. Perhaps that originates in the secondary role colorists were given in the assembly line production of comic books, but it belies the primacy of color in art.
Nevertheless, Adams' fluid line, his inky blacks, dynamic figures and boundless space, --all attest to his craft and imagination-and suggest that Superman, Aquaman, and Jimmy Olsen live on in a world much closer to us than we ever thought possible.

*I was using the Uniroyal ball point pen and I think this was the first of these I decided to color. And the first Neal Adams piece I'd copied since I was about 14. It was a challenge then--&  it still is!

The Ultimate Comic; Warlock

Warlock was the comic for me when I was 14-15. In Jim Starlin's hands it was a masterpiece of cosmic space-opera, replete with cigar-smoking trolls, beautiful women (more likely to kill you than kiss you) and galactic revolution against an evil empire(before Star Wars!), all topped off with a mystic quest to come to terms with identity, fate and the meaning of existence! And all of it masterfully orchestrated in the hands of the most interesting and innovative comics creator of his generation. Wow. Can't top that! And for a period of about a year and a half--Warlock was the best book on the comics racks.
The fallen figure positioned at the bottom of the page was a favorite motif of Starlin's during these years--he uses it at least two or three times during his Warlock run, and at least once on Captain Marvel; nevertheless, it's always effective. And it contributes to a sense of monumentality(-those fallen heroes seem enormous-)-appropriate to the stories he was telling.

I chose to play around with the color scheme on this one. I'm a sucker for that blue in the sky that dominates the original--but I wanted to try a warmer palette--and see its impact on the emotional character of the piece. apologies for the wonky logo!

Klik-Klak,Kamandi & Kirby

This was the first issue I bought of Kamandi back in '73. I'd held off in part because it wasn't a traditional super-hero book, (no colorful costumes!) and because it had been abruptly inserted into the DC lineup in place of the New Gods( or was it The Forever People?)
 I found this cover irresistible--still do. The image of an enormous insect on a leash, leaping from the page, was too exciting, too intriguing to ignore, and so I plunked down my 20 cents and walked out of the drugstore with Kamandi no.12.

Suffice to say, I was hooked right away and bought every issue thereafter until Jack left the series.  And while Kamandi's origins lie in DC publisher Carmine Infantino's hope to capitalize on the "Planet of the Apes" craze, Jack made it his own, so much so that from a contemporary vantage point, I think Kamandi holds up much better than the "Apes" movies themselves--or at least the sequels. And while it's often dismissed as an "Apes" rip-off,  Kamandi is filled with imaginative characters that by all rights should have found their way into those movies. Characters such as Klik-Klak, the giant grasshopper who adorns this cover and its follow-up, and who was as good a friend as Kamandi ever came across and who was lost to Kamandi, and to us, all too soon. Despite only a few appearances, Klik Klak made a strong enough impression that he's remembered fondly 40 years after the fact.  Jack could do that, create incidental characters that were unforgettable.

Ploog in Space: MoF no.3

 More Ploog! As I mentioned in the first post, I wanted to do a number of these Ploog covers from his early run on "The Monster of Frankenstein"--before Marvel changed the logo. If I were to take a guess, I'd say this logo was an invention of Mike Ploog himself--so well attuned to his sensibility it seems to be. I loved drawing this logo, it really has that movie monster vibe.
I've talked a little about pictorial space, in Kirby and Kane. In some of these early covers, Ploog defines a space all his own-very different from either K & K -and a unique response to the division between upper and lower tiers seen in early seventies Marvel covers. In this piece and in a few others, there's an almost elliptical sense of space. His figures seem to be scooped up within a curvilinear embrace that holds them within the boundaries of the page, but allows for breathing room in and around them.  Not only does Ploog subvert the editorial restriction, but he uses this innovation to expressive effect as well, the elliptical space imbuing a sense of volatility and unease appropriate to his subject.

Gil Kane: The Atom, no.32

As a little guy I get a kick out of the Atom as a colossus. Great cover by Gil Kane in period when he did a lot of great covers for DC, on the Atom and Green Lantern in particular. The covers he did for DC are very different in their use of pictorial space from those he did for Marvel in the Seventies. The Marvel covers are -for the most part--divided between upper and lower tiers, compressing the area in which Kane placed his figures. In contrast, the DC covers from the sixties allow for more vertical freedom, and so we see a good deal more flexibility and freedom in Kane's compositions. I'm guessing this was an editorial directive, because a good many Marvel covers of the seventies are composed accordingly, the artists might have been told that the action takes place within such and such an area below the logo. At the point in the sixties when "The Atom" cover was done, there doesn't seem to have been such a directive at DC, and so their covers, by Kane, Infantino, Kubert and especially Adams-are unique in the freedom with which they play around with space.  So this is one of Kane's best, I think--and it's wonderful for the way he pulls the viewer up and into the space, making the 6" x 9" picture area seem vast and The Atom himself as monumental as--oh--Mount Rushmore.

If Burne Hogarth is the Mickey L of Comics, then Frazetta is...?

Rubens' love of women. Goya's sense of the macabre. But without Rubens' sense of hedonistic joy, or Goya's taste for satire. mix in that uniquely American love of pulp-y trash.

Frazetta. Need I say more? For the conclusion of my first week I thought I'd put up something special--& this cover is one of my absolute faves. Working on these covers you learn some things about the techniques & approaches of the masters that you don't get simply by looking. For instance,  while sketching out this scenario, I definitely picked up the vibe that Frazetta was making this one up as he went along; very little -if any--preliminary drawing.  The Iron bar tracery on the gates is irregular--way too irregular for just a ruin. & The architecture in general is pretty vague. But the big clue is that, well--the Werewolf... in his attempt to conquer the Count--is sitting on Dracula. Who arranges a fight scene like that? Somebody who can make it all up directly from their imagination, that's who. It's not likely you'd hire models to hold this pose for any length of time!

Of course, prismacolor markers aren't oil paint, and so I had to make some alterations to Frazetta's color. I was quite happy to do so-what artist in their right mind wants to be compared with the maestro?