Dave Cockrum 1975 Sketch: Nightcrawler & Storm

Just wanted to post this because, well, Dave was great. The Nightcrawler is actually pretty generic and the face is a bit long, but the Storm... well, Dave clearly has actually looked at women and captured the languid sensuality of her body language. The delicacy of her left hand in the grass is a small be delightful touch. Well done Dave. Miss ya.

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?

Corporate Comics: bad art or bad direction?

We interrrupt the posting of a new bruce timm /yoakum piece for this bit of snark.

Is this professional art, or is this professional coloring? 'Cause it ain't professional drawing.

Recently I had linked to a black widow page of art work that was simply so boring and incompetent that i had to hold it up as an example of bad comic art. This piece is a totally different example of bad comic art. this one is far better about pointing the direction of where corporate comics might be going.

And its scary as hell, if thats the case. Someone channeling James Jean with no structure to the drawing at all.

I mean, look, we all started out apeing someone. But it used to be that you would be told to quit drawing like Kirby or Gil Kane or John Byrne and go learn how to draw. This seems like the perfect example of... well, just about everything bad.

New Work: Rogue by Yoakum

A new ink commission of Rogue! Loved doing the graphic on the hair.

The honest truth is, after spending time pencilling, which I'm admittedly much rustier at than inking, stressing about all the structure and negative/positive and figures etc, picking up a brush to make a pretty version when someone else has done some of the back end work is damn fun.

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.

Original Cover Art: X-Men #137 by Byrne and Austin

20th Century Danny Boy ferreted this one out: a great scan of the original art for this classic cover. I'm putting this up for one reason: its amazing to see. As a professional inker, I have to admire Austin's linework up close and personal as much as I can.

Enjoy. This was part of a run of issues that was as good and classic as anything ever in superhero comics.

More discussion of recreations and "grails" and original art to come.

Viva La '70's: Part Two

An interesting debate rages over the blogosphere over the quality of the '70's comic, with some popular players weighing in. Here are a few bits to catch you up:

Over at Dick Hates Your Blog is a rehash of the 1970's era books, and, lets face it, he doesn't think very much of the them. In particular is his comment that nothing very good came along during the decade.

Marvel and DC were likewise rehashing the previous decade until Claremont and Cockrum (with much help from Len Wein) reinvigorated the superhero team comic. But again, the new X-Men are often lumped in with the comics of the 80s, perhaps because it was so influential on the comics of that decade.

and Heidi MacDonald retorts, quite correctly:

Come on now! Is Dick trying to be silly? As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, the current comics biz is mostly run by post-boomers who all came of age reading 70s comics... Marvel in particular, had a great run that is still being strip-mined to death.

and Journalista at the Comics Journal, the vanguard of comics criticism, weighs in with this deep thought:

But let’s face it: 1970s superhero comics sucked pig balls.

To which many pigs, said "Yeah!" But the rest of us who were picking up the rapidly escalating 20 cent comics of the decade probably have a more informed take on the work. Our friends over at Journalista have their view, now here is mine.

The '70's, which have been labeled by Dick to be a decade without an identity had their high and low moments, but that was all against the backdrop of a huge shift in business and distribution that certainly had an effect upon the content in the books. The traditional newsstand distribution that existed, and thus a particular audience was starting to shift in the '70's, and you would soon see books that were selling on a fraction of the numbers that prior decades had seen.
Marvel, which has a ton of low points, although many of them not as low as DC's in the same decade, also had some very interesting high points. Want to look at Jim Starlin's Captain Marvel and Warlock? The prototype for the giant universe ending crossover. Don McGregor's Killraven and Black Panther were almost of a lyrical bent, with metaphysical leanings, and certainly were the most literary comics prior to Alan Moore's arrival. Steve Gerber's acerbic wit lent Howard the Duck and Man-Thing a bite that would be hard to imagine in today's corporate driven properties. Moench and Gulacy's Master Of Kung Fu was an artistic delight to read (Doug's final story arc of multiple first person narratives in MOKF from #40 - 50 was certainly something that Marvel in the '60's would never have tried). Heidi had it right: Marvel is still mining the second generation of artistic talent that came in after Kirby, Ditko and Steranko.

Do I even need to mention the All New, All Different X-Men? I doubt that we would have comics today without them. As I mentioned in an older post on Dave Cockrum's death, we should be kissing the feet of Claremont, Byrne, Austin, Wein, and Cockrum that we have an industry to blog about.

That was Marvel in the '70's. It didn't need to establish one single identity to have some great high points.

DC? Put this in your pig testicles: Kirby's Third World is modern mythological foundation for the DC universe, started in the '70's. Do we have the Batman of today without Rogers and Adams' versions? Nope.

Your turn!