Marvel Comics blabbery

I always thought Gene Colan had a pretty unique cinematographic perspective to his pages. Most of the big Marvel/DC artists of his period more often would have the angle so you are looking down at the item in the picture, Colan would often use the perspective from looking up at the character in the frame. I think Colan had this in his earlier comics, but as he got working for Marvel and on into the 70s then back to DC, it became more his thing. It kind of reminds me of some of the camera angle tricks you would see in some 60s movies and TV shows, especially something where they wanted to give the effect of 'things are not right'.

Can't think of too many pros that directly looked like Colan, but I think some of that panel layout and perspective many other artists picked up from him. I think you see it in Miller's Daredevil quite a bit. Tom Mandrake is one 80s/90s comic artist whose style seems to have a heavy Gene Colan influence except less smooth and maybe a bit more jagged like from say Joe Kubert.

Frank Brunner is another artist that has similarities in his style with Gene Colan, I'd think that is perhaps one reason Colan was used as one of the artists on Howard the Duck.

So glad that you dudes with the deep comics knowledge are around here, seriously. I've always been more focused on writers and story so it's nice to read some history/commentary on the artists.

(An aside: I'm pretty sure my first exposure to Colan was via an issue of the Archie Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series.)

a quick marvel unlimited check suggests they have most if not all of the 60's for reading so i'm giving this half a shot and just cracked 1963. The writing is atrocious! The art is consistently astonishing.

Feel free to share non-atrocious highlights...

well right off the bat, did Lee get confused as to how many skrulls were left on earth? Three turn into cows, the other is apparently free to join the escaping armada?
And the grey/green hulk shift appears to be an accident of coloring, yes?

the early peter parker-looking mutant story in Tales to Astonish is the secret start of the X-Men isn't it?

Both Lee and Kirby had notoriously poor memories (which of course caused all sorts of grief later), and as production at Marvel cranked up, editorial resources were even more thinly stretched, so that there was nobody paying strict attention to the lore of the Marvel Universe until Roy Thomas turned up. A friend of mine owns an original Kirby Thor page where Jane Foster is described as 'Thor's Gal' in Jack's margin notes. Lee and Kirby were old pros enjoying a surprising second act; they weren't sweating the details, they were just riding the wave. The Fantastic Four between abt issues 25-80 is still, imho, pretty near-perfect superhero comics. Now most of that is Jack's doing, obviously, but I think Stan contributed something, too - not to mention Joe Sinnott, who really gave the comic a very sleek finish, with no details cheated on.

I've been surprised by how long some of the '60s stories lasted (I think there was a stretch of Thor that sustained an ongoing narrative for about a year and a half). Most of them are total shaggy dog stories that end up miles away from where they started, but still. I expected "one and done" to be more of the norm but that largely tapers off in the early '60s. Although I understand that it does become more the norm in the late '60s/early '70s?

There was definitely a period in the late 60s/early 70s where Marvel swore off continued stories, but they soon gave up on that.

a lot of the 60s Thor run is overlapping story arcs - in the middle of one three-issue story they'll introduce the elements that lead into the next three-issue arc *rinse and repeat*. this gets messed up towards the end of the Kirby run, the last 6 months or so there is clearly some editorial meddling/fighting over the direction of the book

also Ward mentioned him already but I wanted to give some more love to Chic Stone as a Kirby inker, some really nice looking issues got turned out under that combo

i totally get that it's not a good look to be all "WHY AIN'T THIS FUNNYBOOK CONTINUITY RIGHT IN 1962, I DEMAND CLARITY" but they're just barely trying to keep the train on the tracks for much of this year.
in any case, these are an easier read than i remember. reading on a pad is fun!

continuity is for chumps

hmm, i'm tempted to do the same. there a good reading guide for that era through MU?

Quick question: is Masterworks dead? I've been steadily buying and enjoying the trade paperbacks. What am I supposed to do? I'm running out! Help!

I don't need continuity, but when continuity is an explicit goal, I appreciate when it's well-maintained. I get the logistical challenges involved (particularly over the course of several decades) and I'm not particularly pedantic about it, but if you're telling a story, I'm kind of a stickler for the basics of storytelling mechanics. Which implies at least a degree of consistency.

Not that this applies to early silver age Marvel. AFAICT, these guys were just beginning to move away from a world of one-off stories (or, at best, random snapshots of the lives of ongoing characters) so I'm forgiving of their narrative foibles.

Nhex, I posted this link a few posts up.

And on the off-chance that anyone here wasn't already aware of it, the Unofficial Handbook of Marvel Comics Creators is a godsend of an online resource. Prepare to lose some productive hours.

thanks OL

Masterworks are still coming out sporadically

Ward- Do you consider the 60s Marvel artists even better than early 50s EC? I think Kirby and Ditko are more visionary than the EC guys, but I think EC stable is better because the sheer number of brilliant artists they had, no substandard guys. Even the not-so-great brief guest artists were pretty solid.
Too many Marvel comics from the 60s look a bit shoddy. I'm a big fan of Bill Everett (or at least certain eras of him) but I don't think his work for Dr Strange, Hulk, Daredevil or various other things were very good. I think it looks like he's been pressured to modernise and it looks very uncomfortable.

Old mainstream comics are a source of endless bittersweet frustration to me. A lot of them are very important to me and I like those artists better than any other era of comics yet I feel the comics are like piles of crap with dazzling gems embedded in them.
I really wish the creators could do it all over again with the hindsight we have today and condense all the good things into a smaller and better collection of books. But it's difficult to imagine how they'd do it.
Anthology comics like Tales From The Crypt, Amazing Adult Fantasy, Creepy, Ghostly Tales and Twisted Tales are a real passion of mine but it's hard to imagine them being done to any really satisfying level. Coming up with that many good short stories seems impossible. It's no wonder they stole and recycled so many ideas.

I love the Essential/Showcase format so much that it's a real pain I can't fully enjoy anything on offer in them. Flipping through Dr Strange is great though.

Part of me wishes all these artists had became fine artists instead. A disreputable bunch of fantasy artists.

moments of genius amidst the shoddy/cliched/nonsensical stuff is part of the appeal for me, I think

I'm warming more to the stories as i read them in bulk

yet I feel the comics are like piles of crap with dazzling gems embedded in them

This reminds me of reading old Donald Duck comics. Carl Barks on ten pages, then pure crap the rest of the way.

moments of genius amidst the shoddy/cliched/nonsensical stuff is part of the appeal for me, I think

― soref, Wednesday, 4 February 2015

Have you ever seen something that was completely amazing and then said "I wish this had worse writing with insanely excessive pointless repetition, more sloppy/rushed looking visuals, worse designs, mistakes and recycling of good things that cheapens the first time they were done"?

Nhex- I think most of the better modern comics have less heaps of flaws than my favourite comics of 50s to mid80s.

Have you ever seen something that was completely amazing and then said "I wish this had worse writing with insanely excessive pointless repetition, more sloppy/rushed looking visuals, worse designs, mistakes and recycling of good things that cheapens the first time they were done"?

I'm a Doctor Who fan, so...

Haha. I haven't seen much Doctor Who but what I liked some of the Pertwee era.

Nhex- I think most of the better modern comics have less heaps of flaws than my favourite comics of 50s to mid80s.

also lol DJP

In modern comics I rarely find that sort of density that old comics are plagued with or The need they had to tell you everything a few times. That's one great thing about Japan, even their old comics breeze along by comparison.

I mean, what sort of problems do the better comics have today? Some of the colouring is really bad but I can't think of much else.

wait. i'm sorry, i totally misread you, i thought you were saying the opposite thing

Ward- Do you consider the 60s Marvel artists even better than early 50s EC?

I don't know about 'better'. As a comic strip artist (rather than illustrator) Kirby could do things Al Williamson couldn't (ie tell a dynamic and personally invested story), but it would be difficult to argue against the sheer craft of so many of the EC artists in their prime, and Marvel never really offered the same kind of freedom to experiment with form that people like Krigstein, Kurtzman or Craig enjoyed at EC (it also seems really obvious that the way that Marvel addressed its readership through letter columns and so on owed a great deal to the way that Gaines/Feldstein spoke to, and engaged with, 'EC Fan-Addicts'). In both Marvel and EC's case, it makes much more sense to read their comics on an installment basis, rather than in huge chunks, when the limitations of formula and genre start to become very apparent.

no substandard guys

Never been much of a Jack Kamen fan; the Harrison/Wood collaborations are horrible; Severin inked by Elder is not playing to either of their strengths; Feldstein's stiffly ugly artwork is the v definition of an acquired taste. There's plenty of dross in every major EC title if you dig deep enough, tho' by about '53 all of their major artists are absolutely ON FIRE.

moments of genius amidst the shoddy/cliched/nonsensical stuff is part of the appeal for me, I think

Agree w/ this. It seems like a real fool's errand - or a recipe for perpetual disappointment - to expect a constant stream of 'masterpieces' from such a labour intensive and economically marginalised cultural form as the monthly American colour comic book. The dross illuminates the good stuff, if only by negative example.

the technology advances in production and printing alone have made comics a more consistently high quality product

Some of the 'modern' computer colouring, illustration and lettering tools used by current comic book artists look ineffably ugly and vulgar to my old school eyes, so I don't necessarily think technological improvement equates to a 'quality' product (actual 60s Marvel comics, printed from the original artwork, usually seem far more beautiful and elegant than the whizzbang stuff of today, imho). Obviously modern, streamlined storytelling techniques are a response to the fact that these days, comic book readers have so many other distractions and pleasures to choose from, so there simply isn't time for the huge amount of (over)writing that ppl like Stan and Roy Thomas could indulge in. Again, I don't think this means that the caption-less, thought balloon-less, read-it-in-five-minutes comic book is automatically superior, or inferior.

great post, ward!

Severin inked by Elder is not playing to either of their strengths

but it's so cuuuurious! such a weird blend of their two styles - not complementary, not an improvement, but a really interesting combination. like P Craig Russell on Mignola.

Some of the 'modern' computer colouring, illustration and lettering tools used by current comic book artists look ineffably ugly and vulgar to my old school eyes

I find 92% of '60s Marvel str8 unreadable but it's SO much easier on the eye to flip through, or look at images from, than 98% of modern assembly-line comics

Ward otm

I like Kamen a lot, some of his rendering ability is stunning. His work for the picto fiction line is really impressive.
Remember all those jokes about Kamen being "too nice?", get a load of this
http://www.comics.org/issue/353075/cover/4/

I love Feldstein. His work always looks very alive and awake to me.

It really doesn't help that there's so much hype and worship around EC and silver age Marvel. The way reprints are often priced and presented reinforces that. There are still lots of seemingly otherwise sane adults who will freak out in denial if you say to them that these comics are badly written (I think Feldstein writes fine but there's just too way way way much of it). As a teenager reading all those TwoMorrows magazines, I felt like a blasphemer when I was admitting the flaws of the classics.

I really like the idea of reading Kirby era Fantastic Four but I just can't and that's pretty damming that lots of people feel this way. But I should say there are lots of golden and silver age comics that read just great and have very economical writing. Even some Stan Lee comics from the 50s are relatively restrained. I think Eisner's Spirit reads well. Kids comics should read like that.
It's just incredibly unfortunate that two of the best sets of old American comics are written the way they are.

In the Masterworks reprints I remember Mike Allred going along with all the hype, so when Steve Bissette written his alarmingly frank introduction for Amazing Fantasy Omnibus, I was amazed Marvel printed it.

As much as I think it's true that people underestimated these comics, I think it's very important to see that the snobby public was half right that these comics are trash.

Heinlein's Law applies but i don't see why you can't also apply Oscar's Law.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxgWHzMvXOY

Marvel never really offered the same kind of freedom to experiment with form that people like Krigstein, Kurtzman or Craig enjoyed at EC

This is interesting because a lot of people consider EC too rigid with their overall form but they certainly allowed everyone their own drawing style. Krigstein had to fight to get his way with the panel arrangements at EC but he went nuts with his work for other publishers.

Forks, can you tell me the title of that video because my kindle doesn't show embedded videos.

Oscar the Grouch's "I Love Trash"

To be honest, I love a lot of the overwritten Stan Lee stuff. That's what I come for. To want to erase that or edit it out seems like a fool's errand along the lines of colourising old movies or, you know, the Star Wars special editions. These comics are what they are, they're a point in the evolution of the form, and trying to change them so they read better to current generations seems crazy wrong to me. If you don't like them then read modern comics that are more to your tastes (and which, in forty years, will doubtless seem as dated and unreadable as you feel Silver Age marvels are). You're not wrong or right to have issues with this era of comics, but they are what they are.

I would never want them edited or changed by anyone.
Feldstein at least seemed to understand he'd overdone it and made them less readable.
Finding Stan Lee's cheer and goofiness charming is understandable but having blocks of text repeatedly explaining the same thing is something I don't know how anyone can defend. A lot of comics from that time never did this.

Wishing they were more economically written (like Eisner's Spirit or Joe Gill's Gorgo & Konga, Tezuka and lots of other old comics) is not remotely the same as colouring black and white movies or adding things to Star Wars.
But Marvel actually does something along those lines. Not only are they horribly recolored in a way that ruins the art (ruining the best reason to buy these comics), some are even redrawn.
http://ohdannyboy.blogspot.co.uk/2008/06/original-art-stories-marvel-masterworks.html
They are fucking with their own comics in a way I think is vile.

Some earlier reprints removed the dotted eyes from Spiderman when he sees Uncle Ben's killer because apparently it looked too goofy for such an important moment.
Some Tomb Of Dracula reprints (such as the Essential collections) covered up female nipples that were in the originals.
http://groovyageofhorror.blogspot.co.uk/2006/09/censored-essentials.html?zx=b452862fc142c0fb

Re: experimentation in Marvel, Gene Colan faced resistance for his work.

And to be totally clear, in this context overwritten doesn't mean purple prose (I love HP Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith. I actually prefer this style to most styles), it means writing the same information again and again and again as if you're trying to beat the information into a child.

Re: dotted Spiderman eyes.
http://comiccoverage.typepad.com/comic_coverage/2008/08/humble-beginnings-spider-manaka-mr-peepers.html

as if you're trying to beat the information into a child

uh this is what they were trying to do

I'm sure most children understood the first time. And if they didn't they'd go back and read it again. Like they'd do with any other well written comic for kids.

Chris Claremont is almost painful for me to read sometimes due to his style being that, forever. Every issue forever telling you that Storm is mistress of the elements, claustrophobic, and strong

Len Wein's Swamp Thing. "Shambling muck encrusted monstosity", I'm sure lines like that were repeated loads of times.