"For all my powers, I could not save _____": An image thread

ok, i love that.

in the future, all doctors are white guys and they still use head mirrors for some reason

late to this but is that Aquaman cover upthread Aparo? somehow it doesn't all quite come together into a visually striking design but so many elements of it are wonderful

yup: http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Aquaman_Vol_1_62

Aquaman and Mera are each about 13 heads high

just realised I don't think I've ever read a comic with Mera in it but I wrote her name without thinking

for all my powers, I could recall her

Love the 60s Aquamans by Aparo and Steve Skeates, amongst the most formally inventive of all Silver Age DCs eg

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_0aF72ivaEJI/TDlIyF5YdCI/AAAAAAAAEVA/LT2MEJpq0U0/s400/Aqua%252053%2520Splash%25202.jpg

pencilled, inked and lettered by Aparo.

wow, that's cool. when i started reading comics as a kid in the mid-to-late 80s, i was buying new batman comics which aparo was drawing alongside british reprints of older batman stories he'd drawn too, so his version of batman is pretty essential to me.

Gotta love the fact that even when Mera is berating her husband for the death of their child, she still calls him "Aquaman".

weirder still is that their kid was also known as 'aquababy' according to that wiki page

how is aquababby formed

Chewed up aquababby parts squashed between aquaman and aquawoman.

fish paste

Someone I know was Aparo's inker for a while - said his pencilled pages always smelled of cigar smoke!

i always imagined kirby's would too

Aparo's art is still the default "what a DC comic looks like" image in my head

DC's super hero line did kind of have a bit of a house look as they had a core group of artists that drew the books for years. It was a cleaner style and they were much tighter on enforcing character guides. I think the best artists in DC's usual line worked on the war and mystery books.

"DC super hero style"
Jim Aparo
Dick Dillin
Mike Sekowsky
Carmine Infantino
Irv Novick
Jim Mooney
Curt Swan
Kurt Schaffenberger

Obviously Joe Kubert was also one of DC's best artists, but he did Sgt. Rock, Tarzan and outside of Hawkman or covers, didn't do as much super hero comics. Kubert's style is also very much him and totally not that clean line look like the others above.

Always hated that house style stuff. Marvel ended up getting it too when some artists were pushed to look more like Romita and Kirby.

It's not that these artists are really bad because most were pretty skilled. Never understood Wayne Boring, Curt Swan, Al Plastino fans. I've seen so many people praise Aparo too but I don't get that either. I do like Kubert, Toth, Nick Cardy, Frank Thorne, Neal Adams, Frank Robbins, Ramona Fradon.

He only did the darker superheroes but I think Jerry Grandenetti is very underrated. Has a wonky charm (some of the anatomy is just way too bad to work though). His later commission work was even more eccentric.
http://web.archive.org/web/20080520172343/http://www.jergrand.com/index.php

What?! Plastino and Boring are incredible. So clean.

A lot of the love for Aparo, mine included, comes at least in part from the guy's ubiquity. 10 years on Brave & the Bold, then Batman and the Outsiders, then Batman during peak-Batmania. (not to mention defining runs on the Spectre and Aquaman). A steady hand on the rudder, contrasted during my fanboy heyday by Breyfogle's wilder Detective art.

Yeah, same here: my first serious comics collectings were Batman Aparo (everyone looking oddly timeless and muscly and as though they were should be wearing checked caps and smoking cigars even when they weren't) and Detective Breyfogle (lovely, sketchy underappreciated stuff)

dude did a breakdown of the damsel carried by monster/hero trope
http://www.retrospace.org/search/label/carry

i am digging the cheesecake/sleaze vibe of that blog

"I'm too late!" is kissing cousin to "For all my powers"
http://cache.coverbrowser.com/image/green-lantern-1960/95-1.jpg

The one Marvelism that has always puzzled me is "...IN A WORLD HE NEVER MADE!" Apparently it's a line pinched from A.E. Houseman, but how this relates to the plights of Dr Strange and Howard The Duck is still somewhat oblique.

https://p.gr-assets.com/540x540/fit/hostedimages/1383939213/6709953.jpg
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-nWhwv-6S5c8/UVmEIfau8nI/AAAAAAAB4BY/DktNoywlV6k/s1600/Howard+the+Duck+01+-+00+-+FC.jpg

someone on another message board speculates it may have come to marvel via this 1950s sci-fi story

http://images.yuku.com.s3.amazonaws.com/image/jpeg/4ef36b4e55f02396344655848725b3b22737a0f5.jpg

that is one giant woman

busty giantesses something of a specialty for Amazing Stories cover artists

haha, yeah, i always struggled to parse "a world he never made," figuring it had to somehow be a pun or something, given its association with Howard the Duck.

do any other Marvelisms feature prominently in rock songs?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOAdhIWpgk8

Ha, that makes me realize that "Waitin' For A Superman" is basically a magnificent re-rendering of these covers in ballad form.

The strapline from the new series, "Trapped in a world he's grown accustomed to", is sadly the only good thing about it

This sorta fits into the "too late" meme - either way I just love this cover

http://cache.coverbrowser.com/image/superman/408-1.jpg

Bonus points for creeeeepy doll

Housman is pretty bummed about the world he never made:

The laws of God, the laws of man,
He may keep that will and can;
Not I: let God and man decree
Laws for themselves and not for me;
And if my ways are not as theirs
Let them mind their own affairs.
Their deeds I judge and much condemn,
Yet when did I make laws for them?
Please yourselves, say I, and they
Need only look the other way.
But no, they will not; they must still
Wrest their neighbour to their will,
And make me dance as they desire
With jail and gallows and hell-fire.
And how am I to face the odds
Of man's bedevilment and God's?
I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made.
They will be master, right or wrong;
Though both are foolish, both are strong.
And since, my soul, we cannot fly
To Saturn nor to Mercury,
Keep we must, if keep we can,
These foreign laws of God and man.

feel compelled to make a Legion of Super-Heroes/A Shropshire Lad joke but can't quite get there

The Houseman is very Jack Kirby if you just add an exclamation point to the end of each line.

The laws of God, the laws of man!
He may keep that will and can!
Not I: let God and man decree!
Laws for themselves and not for me!
Gone! Gone! -- the form of man --
Rise, the Demon Etrigan!!

A+

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-xsIrDo19itU/VSL1MEz_P7I/AAAAAAABI1s/MPoGAmi4ixU/s1600/Marvel%2BTeam%2BUp%2B061-01.jpg

That does not look like a Byrne page!

Sloppy secret-ID security to refer to himself by govt name out loud.

huh I hadn't noticed but yeah that really doesn't look like Byrne does it

WHAT A MESS!

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7136/7509105030_4a5b2cd4e8_c.jpg

that cover is one of those panels that if you try to imagine in what order the action and the dialogue take place, your brain will break

like did he see ulik running down the street at him and he just planted his thor self in front of a truck and soliloquized and at the end ulik rams him into a truck
or is he micromachining through the dialogue as ulik rams him
does he get halfway through the speech and then ulik connects and he just screams the rest as he's flying through a truck
we just can't know

this particular phrasing seems almost entirely limited to Marvel, like it was just a stock phrase approved for use by editors

He gets rammed between the round balloon and the spiky balloon, obviously. "Oh, Ulik's back" RAM "Oh shit, I'm in trouble."

Who is Ulik, BTW?

classic kirby baddie
http://i388.photobucket.com/albums/oo326/OneDumbG0/Thor%20Fights/ThorvsUlik01137.jpg