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Posts: 937
Oct 19 13 5:33 PM
Hepcat wrote:I thought the problem with Sheldon Moldoff's renderings of Batman was Bob Kane. Moldoff was a pretty good artist in his own right but he was being compelled to mimic Kane's style on Batman, a style which while distinctive was also stiff and artificial.
Dick Tracy was another feature of the time drawn in a very distinctive albeit unnatural style.
Posts: 1784
Oct 20 13 7:35 PM
Osgood Peabody wrote:Here are some notable developments that took place this month... Over in Adventure Comics, the LSH finally discovered the existence of the Substitute Legion in "The Legionnaire's Super-Contest":
Oct 20 13 7:56 PM
Osgood Peabody wrote:As Commander Benson mentioned in a previous capsule, DC had numerous "semi-imaginary" tales published in the Silver Age. One notable example occurs in this month's Challs story "Sons of the Challengers", where a fortune teller gives the group a glimpse of their offspring in this amusing sequence:
Posts: 4700
Oct 21 13 3:19 AM
Golden Age
sterlling wrote: I know a lot of posters on this thread were original buyers of the books off the stands but as a collector of Batman who wasn't even born until the 1970's the "new look" Batman was only less silly than the previous version. I don't see any hard attempt to get completely out of the silly period until the 70's O'Neil run.Yes many silly characters were cut loose in 64' and the monsters,aliens,giant hands mostly disappeared but as a modern fan that grew up with Miller's version how am I supposed to view the gorilla bomb cover on a Detective comics #339 or Batman auctioning his clothes on the cover of Batman #191?The post 64' may be less silly than the previous version but it still was rocking silly into the 60's to me.I love collecting the books (The cover to the very camp giant hand on Batman #130 is awesome) but isn't the 64' new look more about subtle "improvements" than any full attempt to return the character to darker roots?I mean hey, if I was a villain I'd probably throw Batman on to Robin (Batman #196) but things like that and the new yellow oval on his chest made the character pretty silly still. People might disagree but I see the new look version until Adams and O'Neil arrive as a transition period that is still very lightweight reading as a fan.
Oct 21 13 3:32 AM
TODD TAMANEND CLARK wrote: I find the artwork of ALEX TOTH to be greatly overrated, but I would love to have seen BATMAN drawn by both JOHN PRENTICE and RUBEN MOREIRA!
Posts: 4563
Oct 21 13 11:56 AM
Yossarian wrote: I've seen "Mad Men"and I know that the wives raised the kids and the men stayed back in Manhattan to drink and screw after work.
Oct 21 13 12:01 PM
Yossarian wrote:On the other hand, I also understood at age 10 that Stone Boy was the lamest super-hero ever created (only the eventual emergence of Arm-Fall-Off Boy, another Legion creation, keeps him from holding down the #1 spot on the lamest ever list) and that this was really like getting a participation medal, which is more about feeling good than actually accomplishing anything.
Posts: 431
Oct 21 13 6:29 PM
alizarin1 wrote:stanbrown wrote:Why would a shop owner used a marked dime to start up his jukebox, and then later take that particular dime back from the coin box? Why does it matter which dime he took back?Why indeed? But then, given that this was a comic strip which routinely featured a parade of costumed criminals as dumb as a bag of hammers, pastel-colored space aliens, dimensional travel, a magical imp and talking animals, perhaps it's best not to over-think the material too much.While I'm at it--on a different point that has confused me since I was a kid: Superman's key to the Fortress of Solitude being disguised as an airplane direction marker. Are there or were there ever such things as airplane direction markers in the arctic? See above.
stanbrown wrote:Why would a shop owner used a marked dime to start up his jukebox, and then later take that particular dime back from the coin box? Why does it matter which dime he took back?
While I'm at it--on a different point that has confused me since I was a kid: Superman's key to the Fortress of Solitude being disguised as an airplane direction marker. Are there or were there ever such things as airplane direction markers in the arctic?
Oct 21 13 9:49 PM
Oct 22 13 8:18 AM
Oct 22 13 10:22 AM
Yossarian wrote: I re-read this issue last night and it was a lot better than I had remembered. The cover story had the Atom working along with the CIA to do some spy work in Vienna, with a final fight scene in a toy store. Like the "Old Look" Batman in fight scenes with giant sized props, the Atom in pitched battle using everyday objects was a staple of this part of the Silver Age. The second story was a solid mystery story. The first story was inked by Murphy Anderson, and the second was inked by Sid Greene, and the contrast drove home the reasons that I have always preferred Anderson's inks on Kane. Greene's inks rounded out Kane's figures, but too much so and made them look kind of balloon-ish to my eyes. Also, Greene would always draw people's eyes so that the whites were pronounced and the pupils were tiny, making everyone look constantly surprised.
Posts: 656
Oct 22 13 2:34 PM
Bronze Age
Posts: 1894
Oct 22 13 3:56 PM
Oct 22 13 5:52 PM
COMIC-ART.COM: How did you happen to do Green Lantern? GIL KANE: Well, Carmine (Infantino) and Joe Kubert were doing The Flash for Showcase and they decided they had so much success with The Flash that they would try a second character. So they decided on Green Lantern and they picked me to do it. COMIC-ART.COM: You designed his costume didn't you? GIL KANE: Oh, yeah. And I, in fact, I did another book for them called The Atom, which I pitched to them myself. I designed the character and the costume and everything else, and showed them my drawings and sketches and they decided to build a magazine around it. COMIC-ART.COM: What inspired you to rework the Atom character? GIL KANE: Well, first of all it was very much like characters done by my favorite artists Louie Fine and Reed Crandall, and they owned the title, The Atom, and it just seemed to me it would be a perfect situation, so I suggested it and the book was, you know, successful for a very long time, and as was Green Lantern, but I must admit that I, it was sort of boring doing it. I really didn't enjoy it. COMIC-ART.COM: Oh, really? GIL KANE: No. First because I longed to ink my own pencils, which they wouldn't let me do, and, the only time they would let me ink pencils is when I did westerns. It just so happens I like westerns better than superheroes, so I started to ink more and more of my westerns and then finally when the opportunities came, they would let me ink and just little by little, and I finally went over to Marvel...[end of excerpt]
COMIC-ART.COM: How did you happen to do Green Lantern?
GIL KANE: Well, Carmine (Infantino) and Joe Kubert were doing The Flash for Showcase and they decided they had so much success with The Flash that they would try a second character. So they decided on Green Lantern and they picked me to do it.
COMIC-ART.COM: You designed his costume didn't you?
GIL KANE: Oh, yeah. And I, in fact, I did another book for them called The Atom, which I pitched to them myself. I designed the character and the costume and everything else, and showed them my drawings and sketches and they decided to build a magazine around it.
COMIC-ART.COM: What inspired you to rework the Atom character?
GIL KANE: Well, first of all it was very much like characters done by my favorite artists Louie Fine and Reed Crandall, and they owned the title, The Atom, and it just seemed to me it would be a perfect situation, so I suggested it and the book was, you know, successful for a very long time, and as was Green Lantern, but I must admit that I, it was sort of boring doing it. I really didn't enjoy it.
COMIC-ART.COM: Oh, really?
GIL KANE: Well, [Bernard Sachs] left comics to go into advertising early on. He was always concerned with making money, and he made, as an inker, more than a great many pencillers. We were quite friendly for a while – despite the fact that I found him one of the worst inkers that I ever encountered. Bernie wasn’t without drawing skills but he was so unsympathetic to what I or Carmine presented him. SW: The notable team-up is Sachs and Mike Sekowsky… GIL KANE: In fact, you know, when Bernie was assigned to Justice League he almost dropped dead because of all those crowd scenes that you’d have to go through, but fortunately Sekowsky pencilled so simply, without any backgrounds, that Bernie found it suited him even better! DP: A marriage made in heaven. GIL KANE: That’s right. Unfortunately I also had Joe Giella for years. I thought that Giella was, generally speaking, a nice guy – but he was probably the most inept single inker that ever worked professionally in comics. SW: Well, we could probably go into an extended bitching session about that… GIL KANE: No, that’s probably my last word on the subject. SW: It’s puzzling, then, that you worked with Giella so much. GIL KANE: I had absolutely no choice, it was an inflexible situation. Jobs were hard to get at that time and whilst we all tried to assert our personalities the people who had the most luck were people like Carmine because he was Julius Schwartz’s favourite artist. So Carmine had his pick of assignments and tended to drift in the direction of his strengths. Meanwhile most of us were assigned material that we felt totally unsuited to – but that was the kind of ass-backwards quality of the business. Everyone had vested interests in doing as little as possible as quickly as possible – the inkers, the writers, so it was the artist who was left with the need to make something out of the material – he was the only one in comics by choice. The editors were failed in every other level of editing and publishing: the writers were all either ex-pulp writers or people couldn’t make any other kind of place for themselves professionally, and colourists were just the kind of marginal craftsmen that comics were made for.SW: That’s a shame. I think that letterers and colourists should be thought of as something more than marginal craftsmen.GIL KANE: Yes of course and they very often are but that was the way of the publishers – they made everything into a General Motors assembly line and institutionalized everything in order to get the work out expediently. The truth of the matter is that they never had to worry about content because, for years, everything sold. SW Getting back to the subject of inkers and assignments… GIL KANE: Yeah, I was doing a thing called 'Space Cabby' for a while with Bernie Sachs and even when I got material in the science fiction books (Strange Adventures and Mystery in Space) that I liked, I would find Bernie just changing everything line for line. DP: All the faces were changed? GIL KANE: Everything. As a matter of fact once, on Rex the Wonder Dog, I had Rex coming out of a plane onto the tarmac of an airport and I left it completely open because I was becoming aware of open space and pattern in my work then… and this will show you how indifferent he was – he put tufts of grass all over this open space, absolutely oblivious to the fact that it was an airport runway. That’s the extent to which he rode roughshod over everything. The inkers had pencillers so controlled that they would complain. Bernie, in particular, would complain to Julie about the fact that Carmine and I were giving him too much to ink and Schwartz gave him permission to cut out what he thought was not essential. SW: Rather like the old Vince Colletta approach to Jack Kirby’s Thors where he’d just rub out a background figure or reduce figures to silhouette… GIL KANE: Colletta did exactly the same thing. He never worked on anyone without deciding what was going to appear and what was not. DP: Talking about various inkers over the years, one person you haven’t mentioned is Murphy Anderson. GIL KANE: Well, Murphy is a good friend of mine and I certainly liked his inking better than Bernie Sachs or Joe Giella. The only thing is that Murphy had a very determined style of his own and I felt that he always looked very good on Curt Swan. SW: George Klein I prefer…DC: I think the combination of your pencils and Anderson’s inks are beautiful. GIL KANE: I never thought that Sid Greene was as good an inker as Murphy but I felt that he was more faithful to my penciling, so I always preferred his rendering – even though there was a kind of scratchiness, a wooliness about it that I didn’t like. The fact remains that I saw everything that I had put down in pencil. DC: There was more liveliness in it, I think. GIL KANE: That’s the one reservation I always had about Murphy’s stuff. DC: Yes, it’s very polished. GIL KANE: But also kind of static – I thought there was a kind of stiff, upright quality about the material. You hardly ever saw diagonal shapes or conflicting shapes, you just saw verticals and extending gestures… it lacked any kind of spontaneous quality. SW: Looks like we’ve covered most of Julius Schwartz’s roster of inkers for the first half of the sixties. It sounds far more “know your place” than I’d imagined. GIL KANE: Julie knew very little about our act but was rigid and authoritarian because he was terrified that the publisher would come down on him for some infraction. He was difficult in that regard. He was a nice guy in that he kept his group together as much as he could, giving us all the work that we required.[end of excerpt]
GIL KANE: Well, [Bernard Sachs] left comics to go into advertising early on. He was always concerned with making money, and he made, as an inker, more than a great many pencillers. We were quite friendly for a while – despite the fact that I found him one of the worst inkers that I ever encountered. Bernie wasn’t without drawing skills but he was so unsympathetic to what I or Carmine presented him.
SW: The notable team-up is Sachs and Mike Sekowsky…
GIL KANE: In fact, you know, when Bernie was assigned to Justice League he almost dropped dead because of all those crowd scenes that you’d have to go through, but fortunately Sekowsky pencilled so simply, without any backgrounds, that Bernie found it suited him even better!
DP: A marriage made in heaven.
GIL KANE: That’s right. Unfortunately I also had Joe Giella for years. I thought that Giella was, generally speaking, a nice guy – but he was probably the most inept single inker that ever worked professionally in comics.
SW: Well, we could probably go into an extended bitching session about that…
GIL KANE: No, that’s probably my last word on the subject.
SW: It’s puzzling, then, that you worked with Giella so much.
GIL KANE: I had absolutely no choice, it was an inflexible situation. Jobs were hard to get at that time and whilst we all tried to assert our personalities the people who had the most luck were people like Carmine because he was Julius Schwartz’s favourite artist. So Carmine had his pick of assignments and tended to drift in the direction of his strengths. Meanwhile most of us were assigned material that we felt totally unsuited to – but that was the kind of ass-backwards quality of the business. Everyone had vested interests in doing as little as possible as quickly as possible – the inkers, the writers, so it was the artist who was left with the need to make something out of the material – he was the only one in comics by choice. The editors were failed in every other level of editing and publishing: the writers were all either ex-pulp writers or people couldn’t make any other kind of place for themselves professionally, and colourists were just the kind of marginal craftsmen that comics were made for.
SW: That’s a shame. I think that letterers and colourists should be thought of as something more than marginal craftsmen.
SW Getting back to the subject of inkers and assignments…
GIL KANE: Yeah, I was doing a thing called 'Space Cabby' for a while with Bernie Sachs and even when I got material in the science fiction books (Strange Adventures and Mystery in Space) that I liked, I would find Bernie just changing everything line for line.
DP: All the faces were changed?
GIL KANE: Everything. As a matter of fact once, on Rex the Wonder Dog, I had Rex coming out of a plane onto the tarmac of an airport and I left it completely open because I was becoming aware of open space and pattern in my work then… and this will show you how indifferent he was – he put tufts of grass all over this open space, absolutely oblivious to the fact that it was an airport runway. That’s the extent to which he rode roughshod over everything. The inkers had pencillers so controlled that they would complain. Bernie, in particular, would complain to Julie about the fact that Carmine and I were giving him too much to ink and Schwartz gave him permission to cut out what he thought was not essential.
SW: Rather like the old Vince Colletta approach to Jack Kirby’s Thors where he’d just rub out a background figure or reduce figures to silhouette…
GIL KANE: Colletta did exactly the same thing. He never worked on anyone without deciding what was going to appear and what was not.
DP: Talking about various inkers over the years, one person you haven’t mentioned is Murphy Anderson.
GIL KANE: Well, Murphy is a good friend of mine and I certainly liked his inking better than Bernie Sachs or Joe Giella. The only thing is that Murphy had a very determined style of his own and I felt that he always looked very good on Curt Swan.
SW: George Klein I prefer…
DC: I think the combination of your pencils and Anderson’s inks are beautiful.
GIL KANE: I never thought that Sid Greene was as good an inker as Murphy but I felt that he was more faithful to my penciling, so I always preferred his rendering – even though there was a kind of scratchiness, a wooliness about it that I didn’t like. The fact remains that I saw everything that I had put down in pencil.
DC: There was more liveliness in it, I think.
GIL KANE: That’s the one reservation I always had about Murphy’s stuff.
DC: Yes, it’s very polished.
GIL KANE: But also kind of static – I thought there was a kind of stiff, upright quality about the material. You hardly ever saw diagonal shapes or conflicting shapes, you just saw verticals and extending gestures… it lacked any kind of spontaneous quality.
SW: Looks like we’ve covered most of Julius Schwartz’s roster of inkers for the first half of the sixties. It sounds far more “know your place” than I’d imagined.
GIL KANE: Julie knew very little about our act but was rigid and authoritarian because he was terrified that the publisher would come down on him for some infraction. He was difficult in that regard. He was a nice guy in that he kept his group together as much as he could, giving us all the work that we required.
[end of excerpt]
Kane's mention of Reed Crandall as one of his favorite artists brings to mind something that I mentioned years ago on this forum: Although I understand the "house loyalty" that Schwartz felt to artists like Sachs, Giella and Greene, I think it's a real shame that at least by 1964 he didn't contact Crandall and somehow begin to phase him into his titles and phase out one or two of the other three. Crandall inking Kane's pencils would have been dynamite, and no doubt a real treat for Gil to have one of the greatest comic book artists of the 1940s and 50s inking his work. And Reed Crandall penciling and inking his own art would have been a real eye-opening experience for DC fans who were used to seeing the more simplified drawing of the early 60s era at DC. I'd love to have seen him take a crack at a "Time Pool" story in The Atom, which would have been ironic since Crandall was one of the artists who drew Doll Man, "The World's Mightiest Mite", for Quality whom Gil's concept of The Atom was largely based on.
If you're curious to see what Crandall was doing exactly at this time, below are three pages from the historical tale "The Pirate and the Patriot" from the October, 1963 issue of Treasure Chest magazine::
Whenever I think about this, it's disappointing that Schwartz couldn't find something for this guy to draw at DC during the 1960s.
Oct 22 13 6:23 PM
Oct 23 13 3:46 AM
seattleguy wrote: Interestingly I have never seen an Anderson drawn story that was inked by anyone other than Anderson himself.
Posts: 8154
Oct 23 13 4:14 AM
Posts: 6856
Oct 23 13 8:38 AM
Registered Member
alizarin1 wrote: GIL KANE: "Everyone had vested interests in doing as little as possible as quickly as possible. . . The editors were failed in every other level of editing and publishing: the writers were all either ex-pulp writers or people couldn’t make any other kind of place for themselves professionally, and colourists were just the kind of marginal craftsmen that comics were made for."
Oct 23 13 10:12 AM
dearlenbaugh wrote:alizarin1 wrote: GIL KANE: "Everyone had vested interests in doing as little as possible as quickly as possible. . . The editors were failed in every other level of editing and publishing: the writers were all either ex-pulp writers or people couldn’t make any other kind of place for themselves professionally, and colourists were just the kind of marginal craftsmen that comics were made for."OUCH!
Oct 23 13 10:15 AM
Lee Semmens wrote:seattleguy wrote: Interestingly I have never seen an Anderson drawn story that was inked by anyone other than Anderson himself. I have reprints of a few early 1950s Murphy Anderson pencilled stories which were inked by others; Joe Giella and Sy Barry (later of the Phantom fame) at least, maybe others too.Plus this one: http://www.comics.org/issue/22209/#157923
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