Quick Look: Hulk Special #1 Cover by Jim Steranko

While i'm on this Adams and Steranko kick, I wanted to share one of the most iconic images from that era, one that has gotten lost over the years as time has marched by. Steranko's Hulk cover was an astonishing design, with the integration of the logo into the artwork, and the fact that Hulk's head is really too large for his body. But it works, and it works beautifully since it allows the expression to be read better at this size, a triumph of getting the artwork to fit the message rather than be a slave to any one master (such as pre-designed proportions).

It isn't a wonder that Stan gave Jim all this freedom when it came to his work at Marvel, after all, he was looking at the stuff and knew that Steranko was on that enviable upward curve where the artwork experiences rapid leaps almost every month. What I don't get is how he didn't realize how Jim getting the writer credit and freedom to experiment would hurt Kirby. That lack of emapthy was a huge miscalculation at best, or a huge blind spot at worst. I suspect the latter.

A Quick Look: X-Men #58 Cover by Neal Adams

These days, it would be interesting to see what sort of budget it would take to get Neal Adams and Jim Steranko to do some work on your comics. And to then have it be cancelled. Because no one wanted to read it.

Welcome to the X-Men. Except that this is no X-Men like you've ever seen before. This is the "we're hanging on by the skin of our teeth and are about to get canned" X-Men. And it shows.

Adams and Steranko both dropped in and knocked out some stunning work on a book that neither of them could have cared less about, but that is because they were, in their prime, stunning artists who didn't need to be in love with the work to make everyone else in the industry look like amateurs. They were the next generation of stars in the comics and they would have a profound effect on the industry for the next 20 plus years. Longer even.

Adams' design for Havok was a delightful and inventive bit of visual imagery. the lack of highlights on the black costume, as well as the concentric circles showing the building of power in his body we something that no one had done before. And should have been done for the First Class movie. Why they didn't I don't know. Adams would also knock off designing the infamous Cerebro helmet that would get used for decades to come. Enjoy seeing the original art for this one, and ask yourself, what were they whiting out all over the cover?

A Bit Of: Steranko - Our Love Story #5

Steranko's work back in the early 1970's was starting to wind down, before his final disagreement with Stan made him completely walk away. The last three short stories that he did for Marvel are fascinating, and among my favorite work of his. In particular, the Tower of Shadows #1 short story, is a devastating tour de force of pacing, lighting and narrative flexibility that has been equaled very few times in the last 40 years. Its that good.

Less well known is his attempt to re-invent the visual language of the romance story, and the short from Our Love #5 is an interesting stab at it. This is the first time I've ever seen a color guide from that story, a perfect example of how they called out the CMYK values back in the day. Take a little peak behind the curtain....

Sketch A Day #1, Hugo Cabret & Steranko's Cap

Leonard from the Big Bang Theory episode with paintball was frozen on the TV screen when i picked up the pencil, so he got immortalized in this sketch thanks to the magic of the DVR. Not what I imagined opening the 365 Day challenge with, but sometimes you have to go with it.

A number of years ago The Invention of Hugo Cabret ended up on my daughter's book shelf. I've no idea where it came from, but i scooped it up to read. Enjoyed it, thought that as long as you didn't try to make sense of it, your could let the plot flow along because, well, the writer was taking it where he wanted it to go. It was filled with a child's sense of wonder at the world, and a distinct lack of grown-up inflicted logic to ruin the experience. Appropriate, since the protagonist is a child, one who lived in a fairy tale world behind the clock works of a busy Paris train station. It is appropriately viewed as both staging area and metaphor since Hugo and his deceased father were the ones that kept the clocks running on time, and now that his father has passed away, the completion of the clockwork man, the finding of the missing key and the discovery of his orphanhood are coming to a head as his time runs out.

Yes, I hear you complain, I know all that. I've read the reviews and I've seen the trailer. But what you want to know is: is it a graphic novel? Or a Big Little Book on steroids?

Now that's a good question. There certainly are a huge number of illustrations (284 to be precise) as well as prose, and if we're going to argue that graphic novels can be Blankets or Cages or Goodbye Chunky Rice, but not the latest collection TPB of Fables, then we have to consider Cabret a novel. Yes, it has prose sections and employs not a single word balloon in its pages, but it does use images to advance the narrative sequentially, something that pure prose work would never do. Its an inventive use the form, and while a purist might argue that it doesn't fit, i've gotten tired of purists over the years, especially when the person breaking the rules comes up with a solid entertaining read.

And, of course, I just had to share the joys... the joys of the hard cover collector's edition of the three Steranko Captain America issues... and the quality printing that they used on the special edition.

You don't find that kind of care and attention to the registration of color these days.

Ack.

Will we finally get a new Red Tide?

Neil comments on my long ago post on Steranko's Red Tide that the originals were recently exhibited in the Geppi Museum, and that a new version might finally be in the works.

That is good news indeed.

i know that Mike Richardson of Dark Horse was talking about a new version as long ago as 1999, and that, somehow, nothing ever came of it. So it would be something if it were to finally happen.

For one thing, I could finally replace these crappy scans with crisp new scan of Steranko artwork properly colored and separated. Hopefully without breaking the spine of my new book.

This is Steranko at his game changing best folks. This will be a revelation to people if given the same treatment that Dave Steven's Rocketeer was just given. In the era where it was finally time for someone to step and take the next step after Jack Kirby at his 1966 heights, not one but two people came up: Neal Adams and Jim Steranko. The two of them came at the work from different approaches and, like rock and roll in the post-Beatles era, divided all who came after them. Neal, with his highly illustrative approach, took Batman into a new level of iconography by going the opposite of Kane: his Batman, and Green Lanterns, were populated by real people, with clothing that folded realistically over forearms containing arm hear and fingernails that needed to be trimmed. Steranko took Nick Fury to new heights of symbolism, bringing in pop art influences and different production techniques, but more inportantly, taking the vocabulary of comics to a further extreme than Jack did. If jack's Captain America leap with his feet 6 feet apart, Steranko's Captain America was almost 12 heads tall and had his feet 8 feet apart. All while defeating the hordes of Hydra while a jet black dyed Madame Hydra gesticulated hypnotically in the overlay.

Yes, Chandler was Steranko reigned in, but in service of the story, and adapting his prodigious talents to the form that he himself set up: 8 lines of text broken to under two panels per page.

A Big Little book for adults.

Haiku detective fiction.

And unlike other artist whose blank canvas projects stare back and defeated many an artist, Jim had a work ethic and brought his storytelling talents to bare and nailed the book. Even for a conservative 1976 audience.

Hopefully he will restore the text to the original form that had been intended before, as i understand it, moderate censoring by original publisher Byron Preiss.

More info as we go...

More ACBA scans to groove on...

A new collection of pieces from the 1973 ACBA portfolio. John Romita, Mike Royer, Jim Starlin, and Jim Steranko. of all of the them, the Starlin piece is the oddest, a mix of swampy comic characters piled on each other for no other reason that it looks silly. A drunken dare at a con?

Red Tide, Adam Hughes and other random bits of news...

Received my oversized copy of Steranko's Red Tide and was delighted to find that the printing is only about 10 times better on the oversized version than the more readily available pocket version. Well worth the money, which isn't that much, and time to find one.

I want to say "hello" and give a shout out to the two people from Bulgaria who hit last week, and the 4 from Malaysia.

I also want to say "hello" to the person who came here with the Google search "porn porn". Now, we've all done the first search, but do you need it so bad that you have to put it in to Google twice?

And, of course, some new Hughes/Yoakum Wonder Woman!

In Praise Of: Chandler - Red Tide by Steranko

The images are fuzzy, a remnant of poor 4-color printing circa 1976, yet, should one have known where to look in the far off days of the bicentennial, one could have found the first graphic novel for a single $1.

Armed with a hard boiled tale that could have flowed from Hammett’s or Cain’s typewriters, Steranko went about a new format, on a new page size, for a new publisher, and was met with staggering indifference by the world at large.

What a shame, as the book itself is a corker.

The illustrations are laid out two to a page, with text underneath allowing Jim to both play with the page format yet separate the two pieces as different graphic elements. Given that the eye tends to track better left to right than up and down, the illustrations are all vertical, and in full color, or what passes for color in those days.

Rumor has it that the illustrations were never inked, but refined pencil work, then colored at the plate level, and my eye tends to agree with this, although I’m willing to be told differently. Has any of this original art turned up?

Set in the 1940’s, the book is just about what you would think: a private eye taking on a case that he really doesn’t want, a dame that can’t be trusted with a body that would stop a truck, a nervous client whose story lacks in credibility what it makes up in dead bodies. It doesn’t end well, they never end well.


I suppose that you could get all huffy about Eisner’s Contract With God being the first true graphic novel, and we could go on and on about what constitutes a graphic novel til we’re niggling about tiny details. I tend to go with a broader definition, one that allows the artist to play with the words and pictures, the defining feature being that they were thinking of an adult audience, one that wouldn’t be reading FOOM. Red Tide has literary pretensions, genre ones certainly, but is aiming at adults as sure as Eisner was with A Contract With God. Rather than argue, I would love to point out that two of the industry’s greatest lights were both, to an indifferent public who believed that comics could only be juvenile and purile, to book stores that didn’t have a section to put them in, against a printing process that hadn’t the slightest chance of doing their artwork justice, fighting to create a new product that was beyond much of what had been done since the graphic narrative of comics had been invented.

Good for them.

In doing some research, it appears that Dark Horse might have been in negotiations to reprint Red Tide in an updated edition back in 1999. Clearly that never happened, and it’s a shame. It would have introduced a whole new audience to the work. An audience already used to and accepting of Sin city would have no problem diving head first into Chandler’s world.

If you can find a copy, and they’re out there, pick one. It’ll be the little digest gem hiding in the collection. I’m looking for one of the larger ones, with a much more limited print run right now.

Said steranko in a later interview:

When the book appeared it was not embraced by the comic-book community because it didn't have word balloons or captions. Believe it or not, they found that shocking! Red Tide ran about 130 pages with two panels per page and text underneath. I used Golden Sectioning, a mathematical formula to arrange elements in a unified structure, to create an image-to-text relationship that readers would be very comfortable with. The text on any given page related only to that page. It was like film, where dialogue, sound effects, and music relate specifically to the scene on screen. I doubt there's been another book published like it since. What may also have had an alienating effect on comics readers was that the book was created as an homage to such noir films as The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep.

I developed a different way to tell a narrative story that was more related to film than comics and perhaps that was too radical for the existing comics audience."

Quick Hits: Steranko and the X-Men logo

Excerpted froma comic book resources article also mentioned in todd klien's blog): Jim Steranko's comments about taking on the X-Men book, and the design for the now-famous X-Men logo:

“At first, I didn’t want to work on the X-Men because of all the five-sided panels. I couldn’t relate to the characters, I didn’t know how to make it work, so I asked to work incognito on the book. But I signed my name to my first three covers. And that logo they had was awful. Logos were trademarked, but they let me redesign it, just to get rid of that awful logo. I never got paid for it.”

Certainly one of the most iconic logos, if not the iconic logo that Marvel Comics has had since 1962 - and Jim never got paid for it. Sigh.