Almost Finished: Hobgoblin by Romita and Yoakum

Almost there, just have some touches to add to this piece for a collector. Its inks over a John Romita sketch, and boy, is this fun!

I'll post the finished product tomorrow....

Spider-Man and The Green Goblin: finally!

Finished!

Maybe someone will like it.

Your Friendly Neighborhood Who? Pt II

A little more done on this. Its funny, but somehow, once you just pencil in the webbing on his costume that suddenly "it looks like Spider-Man"! Its just somehow the one thing that really get the visual appeal going with the character.

Good old Sturdy Steve Ditko.

Your Friendly Neighborhood Who?

In the middle of working on a new commission piece.

I literally think that this is the first time that I've drawn Spider-Man since i was about 10 years old.

And I actually remember the costume without reference. Scary.

Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, and the Spider-Man Originals Redux

Having read both the comments on my original post, along with the others were listed below heidi macdonald's link to my post, i stand convinced that Stan would not have been to donor of the amazing Fantasy #15 artwork. Having unfairly implicated him, I publicly retract some of my original comments/accusations.

This leads me to something that I've thought about posting for a long time, but simply haven't made the time to do: talk about the infamous warehouse that Marvel stored their artwork in. Its more than urban myth, but some of the story is worth bringing out. Watch for the fallout on this one.

And, for the record, just like with the Lee/Ditko piece, i'd rather get something wrong but get the discussion going so that the truth can either come out (or at least dispel rumors) along the way.

Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, and the Spider-Man Originals

I am sure that most of us had the chance to see this little tidbit of information from the Library of Congree blog:

“Spider-senses” all around the Library were set tingling when we learned that the Library had just acquired 24 pages of original 1962 drawings from “Amazing Fantasy #15,” which marked the first time the world’s most famous web-slinger, Spider-Man, would appear in print anywhere. The Spider-Man origin story in “Amazing Fantasy” was created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko; the pages are Ditko originals, complete with pencil erasures and white-out opaquing fluid.

and this bit on the actual donation and number of pages:

In a deed of superheroic proportions, an anonymous donor has given the Library of Congress the original artwork by Steve Ditko for Marvel Comics' "Amazing Fantasy #15" -- the comic book that introduced Spider-Man in August 1962.

This unique set of drawings for 24 pages features the story of the origin of Spider-Man along with three other short stories -- also written by Stan Lee and drawn by Steve Ditko -- for the same issue: "The Bell-Ringer," "Man in the Mummy Case" and "There Are Martians Among Us."

While I'm missing the attribution, it has been said that the donor asked Steve Ditko's blessing before making the donation, so the question is, who is the donor? Or should we say, who isn't the donor? And I certainly, with no other information other than real, true fanboy supposition, have to say: is there anyone in the world other than Stan Lee that could be the donor?

Lets use a little logic here. Artwork from that era is rare, and having an entire story together speaks volumes over who might have had their hands on the originals. Fantastic Four pages from a similar time frame have hardly shown up even after Jack's death, and when they do, they are split up and scattered across the world.

Who do we know that was around the office back then? Stan, Jack, Steve Ditko, Flo Steinberg in the office, Sol Brodsky in production, letterers like Artie Simek who would have worked in the bullpen. From the interviews, its hard to see Martin Goodman or any of the other Goodman family like his son Chip being there to get their hands on it. Most of these folks are dead, so we have to cross them off the list.

Who would have the motive to donate artwork like that, artwork that is worth a huge amount, potentially millions of dollars? We would have to posit that it was someone who was financially well off, someone who didn't need the money. In all that we know, Stan is well set up in a way that Jack and Steve never were and never would be. He was the company man for years and years, and has his name on all these properties, and I doubt that that has come cheap in his contracts. Plus, we know that he had a contract to get a piece of the films. Yes, the films.

What would be the motive about the donation? What would Stan have to gain by this? In his case, reputation. While Jack and Steve were marginalized over the years by Stan the Man while Stan was still at the helm, even ceremonially, of Marvel, time has done some interesting things to this particular legacy. Jack Kirby has literally been taken from obscurity at the end of his career and HERBIE the robot to being revered as a pop culture icon by multiple books and magazines. Stan, essentially, has been marginalized by those who have taken up Jack's torch and been carrying it since his debacle with the Marvel artwork return. Spider-Man is the one main bit of the Marvel pantheon that isn't Stan and Jack. Fantastic Four, Hulk, Thor, Iron Man, the X-Men, the Silver Surfer and all the rest - we could see them as proof of Jack's creative legacy.

Don't talk to me about Doctor Strange. This is Spider-Man. And this is Stan and Steve. This is Stan confirming his legacy outside of Jack Kirby. And with the Library of Congress donation there is both a certain level of legitimacy and immorality granted.

There really isn't any one else that could have had the chance to get their hands on the complete book. So why doesn't Stan come forward and simply admit that he wanted to donate the original issue for national posterity? Perhaps for the same reason that he wouldn't want to admit that he has some of the other artwork from the beginnings of the Marvel universe. When the pencillers and inkers signed the backs of their checks, they forfeited their rights to the work. But I doubt that Stan ever had to sign such a check. How much of a legal grey area is that artwork in? How much claim to that artwork could the former and current corporate owners have?

Until I hear differently, or other information comes to light, I'll be happy to assume that Stan is the one that made the donation. And while I'm not really sure that it changes my idea about him or his legacy, all I can say is this: as an artist, and a comic book fan, I've very glad that the artwork still exists and in good form. While I doubt that I'll ever get the chance to see it personally, I love knowing that those pages are out there, or at least in there.

Edit 5/21/08: If you direct linked here, then click here for the follow up post.

In Review Of: Logos and Comic Covers

Todd Klein, over at his blog, has been doing a great deal of work on a nine part series on the design and evolution of the X-Men franchise logos, from 1963 to present. In his final part (link here) he presents a number of unused ideas from Rian Hughes that have been comped on to artwork.

Its been a tremendously enjoyable series for the illustrators and designers among us. And it points out how the design around and on top of the artwork directly effects our preception of the artwork. I can't count the number of times that I was at Acclaim watching good cover artwork overwhelmed by the vertical stripe text area that they insisted on having on the covers. It denied the artists to make more of a splash with the artwork, and thus, more possiblity to attract readers. (Oddly enough, as the rest of the comic companies were going full bleed and removing many of the borders so that you could groove on the full Lee or Portacio X-Men, Acclaim went for less artwork. Sigh. I would have loved to have seen more Rags Morales Turok. Hell, I would have loved to have inked more Rags Turok. I did two pages of samples that blew socks off of people back then.)

This is something that I've been bugged by for years, both as an illustrator and as a designer. Lets take a look at Marvel through the years, and critique what they've done for design over the years. We'll see the evolution of Marvel adapting both logo area and cover design to work with both the spinner rack and newsstand, and then move on to experimenting with the direct market.

Start at the beginning, looking at the space around the classic Fantastic Four logo. Interesting negative space, a large logo, with an odd jumble of letter forms. Yet it stands out from across the room, which is what its designed to do. There is very little trade dress around it, something that Marvel would work on soon enough.

I don't think that we can overstate the importance of having Jack Kirby as your cover designer. His work screamed out at you from the page, and he would border design elements on the edge when given the opportunity to help focus the eye. The last think that you really would want to do is restrict a Kirby cover.

Please note FF #140, not a good month for the cover designers, not a good time in cover design period. They were trying to come up with a story hook for the book, and have just as many baloons as on FF#1, but in a far less elegant manner.


What I was always fascinated by were the little corner symbols that they chose to put on the upper left of the book. For instance, I thought, would you be more likely to buy this comic by the fact that it had a guy made of fire, or a big orange rock guy rather than the rest of the cover? John Byrne said that he left the Dave Cockrum heads on the X-Men book for the same number of issues that Dave drew the book before changing it to his drawing. They left the horrible Shang Chi corner guy up there long after Gulacy came on the book, which I never understood.

I was particularly hard on the production guys doing Marvel Team-Up, which had a horizontal Marvel banner, the MTU (Oft called Marvel Throw Up by the less charitable among us) logo, the abridged Spider-Man logo followed by whatever other logo was co-starring with Spidey. I always noticed when they had a co-star that didn't have his own logo, because clearly Saladino or Brodsky or one of the production guys had to quickly knock something together. Or, they decided to try a new logo, perhaps to rebrand the character, even though the word "rebrand" wouldn't be coined for another 15 years.

Just how crappy is this stat of the Ghost Rider? Do we even know who created it?

As Marvel moved in to the seventies, the top banner Marvel Comics Group logo became the standard, thus removing a half inch of space from the page. There was also a solid color drop that started to come in behind certain logos, or on certain months. Someone clearly had decided that the Captain America logo was too busy and they would alternate either black or yellow behind it to make it pop. Of course, given that it wasn't just "Captain America" then but "Captain America and the Falcon", you had a logo treatment that took literally almost 50% of the cover surface area!

I mean, just how big and bold is this Cap logo from issue #104? And doesn't Captain America scream purple to you?

A "Yellow" month for Steve and Sam.

I also liked that they decided to make it easy of us kids perusing the spinner racks, but putting the name on the upper left corner, so that you could take a single thumb and finger connection and flip through all the books in a particular spinner slot in one fell swoop.

Every so often we see some logo work that echo's the negative space of those early FFs. We can see how much larger the Leave it to Chance logo was, in a design similar to the 1963 Marvels. After the initial 4 issue run, the UPS logo would be added, and the logo would be shrunk down slightly. Too bad.

In Defense of: Tom Brevoort and Manga

i'm seeing a lot of posts around the blogoverse regarding Tom Brevoort's column/blog on Manga and, for the most part, people are really having a go at Tom for his remarks. While normally taking pot shots at Marvel is pretty easy these days, I wanted to get the context of what he's saying. Here are the quotes that seem to be getting everyone's panties in a bunch:

I see the rise and spread of manga in this country as additive to the comic book market, rather than directly competing with what we do.... What manga has done is to get a lot more people reading comics. And while they may really only like that one type of comic, at least at the moment, that does open the door to the potential that we could lure some of those readers into checking out what we're doing.

And with that, I completely agree. There is nothing factually wrong with what he's saying, but what is going unsaid is how Marvel and DC will be bending to that Manga reading crowd over the next 20-30 years. Think about the work that was being published coming out of the late 60's: you had a generation fueled by Neal Adams and Jim Steranko that sparked Paul Gulacy and Bill Sienkiewicz and a whole host of others that dominated the direction of art for the next decade.

For the kids now entranced by Manga we'll see the continuation of Manga-fied Spidey as a way to keep the character relevant. Does anyone think that anyone would have published Humberto Ramos 20 years ago? He'd have been relegated to the "never use" slush pile that every editor has sitting in a corner of their crowded office. Things clearly have changed. The kids who did Teen Titans Go! will be looking for that for the next 10 to 20 years.

So, yes Tom, they will become graphically literate and may start to check out what Marvel and DC are doing, but chances are that the "big 2" will have to adapt more than they want to admit to survive and capitalized on those kids.

I think that Tom is getting piled on because he's a Marvel Editor, and he's speaking from that viewpoint. Nothing wrong with that at all, and it should mean something that he's openly speaking about Manga at all, since Marvel and DC had been pointedly ignoring Manga (TokyoPop and the rest) for a number of years. So whatever other stuff you have against Marvel, this acknowledgement shouldn't be one of them.

Tom concludes:

So there's a definite crossover of ideas and approaches going on.

Cool. Good summation. If there is anything that I love, it's that 2007 has more good ideas and more good stuff than we saw 10 years by far. Viva La Good Ideas!

Spider Man, She Hulk and Abomination = Nasty

Is this true? Can it possibly be true? The Redhead Fangirl reports:

Marvel is really bonkers regarding Spidey these days. In Spider-Man: Reign, Peter finds he has killed Mary Jane with his 'radioactive fluid'. Really? I know Quesada and the editors at Marvel have been wanting to jettison the marriage-- but biohazard spunk? A new low for a beloved character, and Marvel. I think I'd like to add that fluid to the Cup-O-Joe.

and

I see that the She-hulk is up against Hulk villians, like the Abomination, and as a S.H.I.E.L.D agent. Now if there was anyone with a...um... liquid biohazard thing going on, it would be the Abomination (who, by the way, if you look at the original Gil Kane version, has actually grown more handsome over the years).

I guess that it can't possibly imagine a Herb Trimpe Hulk getting it on with the Harpy from back in the day, but I bet they did... heh heh.

And just what the heck is up with the Hero Clix? Why are people so ga ga over them? Please explain, someone.