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Separated at Birth - a comic covers interlude

SOMETHING THAT'S ALWAYS FASCINATED me is the way comic artists have re-used various conventions and imagery from what has gone before. I'm not judging. Having worked in the Business, I know that it's a hungry beast, gobbling up ideas faster than most can provide them. So now and again, it's entirely forgivable if an artist might have cause to "reference" earlier ideas - his own or those of others - when a dreaded deadline looms. And sometimes, ideas can be thrust upon an unfortunate artist (or writer) by an over-enthusiastic editor. Goodness knows, I've found myself on both sides of that particular fence. Sometimes an editor would recycle an idea over and over - for example, a hero behind bars, and sometimes an artist would re-use something that had been especially effective for them in the past, like a "camera" angle or a particular layout. Here, then, is a quick dash through several examples of ideas that have cropped up on more than one comic...

Bullpen Bulletins and the Merry Marvel Marching Society

BACK IN LATE 1965 , while my reading interests were firmly focussed on Stan Lee's burgeoning Marvel Comics line, there were other distractions for a typical eleven-year-old like myself. The prevailing cultural phenomenon on both sides of the Atlantic was the spy craze, kickstarted primarily by the movie adaptations of Ian Fleming's James Bond books, which began in 1963 with Dr No . The first Bond movie I saw was Goldfinger , released in September 1964 in the UK. This movie introduced several concepts that would go on to be genre staples - the cool sports car with in-built ordnance, the laser death-ray and the exotic murder techniques, like death by hat and execution by paint. The iconic poster for Goldfinger . Inset: Bond discovers the body of Jill Masterson, while Oddjob prepares for some millinery mayhem. It really didn't matter that these plot devices were absurd, because when you're 11, you don't care about stuff like that. It turns out that covering someone in...

From "Dear Editor" to "Face front, fearless ones"

BACK IN THE MID-1960s , when I first started reading comics, like other kids I was mostly interested in the stories. I'd always had a fascination with Science Fiction since my Mum had taken me to the cinema to see a re-release of Forbidden Planet (1956) when I was about six or so. The movie kept me up all night for weeks afterwards with  nightmares about glowing disembodied eyes that roved the landscape at night destroying esoteric buildings like lighthouses. I'm sure Freudians could have a field day with that one ... but then I was only six years old. To my six year old way of thinking, the Monster from the ID was the ultimate in horror, though to most people today, I suppose it just looks like a large Disney cartoon dog, which is pretty much what it is. The other reason that same movie also caught my attention was because of Anne Francis as Altaira. I guess we don't need any Freudians to explain why that might have been ... Anne Francis was certainly a lot prettier than ...

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From Horrors to Heroes

AS THE DAYS of Marty Goodman's Atlas Comics drew to a close in the late 1950s, the publisher was casting around for the Next Big Thing. Locked in to a draconian distribution contract with arch rivals DC Comics, Goodman was limited to a tight eight titles per month and if he needed to launch a new title, he was forced to cancel an existing one. So, feeling that mystery and science fiction was the coming trend Goodman decided to launch three new comics to complement the existing Journey into Mystery, World of Fantasy and Strange Tales titles. The new books were Strange Worlds , beginning in December 1958 and replacing the cancelled Navy Combat , and Tales of Suspense and Tales to Astonish , both debuting in January 1959, replacing the cancelled Homer the Happy Ghost and Miss America . Journey into Mystery and Strange Tales had been around since the twilight of the Golden Age and changed in content according to Martin Goodman's take on his customers' tastes. So they bega...

Separated at Birth 2 - another comic covers interlude

HERE'S SOMETHING A LITTLE MORE LIGHT-HEARTED than my more recent posts ... another look at the many tropes, cliches and chestnuts that show up over and over again in the cover designs of our favourite comics. I'd barely scratched the surface of this subject on one of my very early entries in this blog, so I'm giving the subject another outing. I should clarify that Marvel and DC comics took quite a different approach to how they created their covers. DC had always traditionally created their covers first, often using the idea behind a "grabby" cover to drive the plot of the story inside the comic. Both Mort Weisinger and Julius Schwartz took this approach with the DC books they edited. Marvel, though, did exactly the opposite, creating their covers after the interior art was completed. This meant that Marvel would often create symbolic covers that might not illustrate a scene from the story inside. But you'll see what I'm getting at as we go along ... IDE...

Thor: The Wilderness Years

THE EARLIEST THOR STORIES have always been associated with the grand art of Jack Kirby. But it wasn't actually that way. While the first seven issues of Journey into Mystery that featured the Thunder God were drawn by Kirby, these tales had none of the epic sweep the Silver Age version of the character is remembered for. Thor would battle Commies and gangsters and we'd rarely see more than tantalising glimpses of Odin and the fabled realm of Asgard. Then, all too soon, Kirby was off the title, re-assigned by Editor Stan Lee to other more pressing projects, like the epic first Fantastic Four Annual (Oct 1963), as well as new titles X-Men and The Avengers .  Working over a plot by Stan Lee and a script by Larry Lieber, Al Hartley turned in his only superhero story of the Silver Age, "Trapped by the Carbon Copy Man". The result was less than legendary. Another artist had to be found for Journey into Mystery 90 (Mar 1963, on sale January) ... and for that task, Stan ...