Fifteen Comic & Fantasy Artists That Stuck With Me: Frazetta, Adams, Kirby and more!

Jamal Igle recently asked a question on Facebook to his friends:

Fifteen Artists who've influenced you and that will ALWAYS STICK WITH YOU. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes.

An interesting list to make!  This is what I came up with, in no particular order:

Jack Kirby.  How could any list not start with the King?  I mainlined the King's comics in double doses in the 70s, first through the reprints of the Fantastic Four, while concurrently reading his Fourth World books at DC. 

John Romita Sr.  One of the major reasons for Marvel's success and the guy I always identified with Spidey.

Steve Ditko.  Of course when I read the reprints in Marvel Tales, I got a whole new trippy take on Spidey and Doctor Strange.  There probably wouldn't have a been a Marvel without both Ditko and Kirby helping out Stan Lee.

Gil Kane.  He bended and twisted both his figures and his panels in ways we had never seen before.  He drew countless covers for Marvel, which he might probably disown, but I think most of them are great.

Neal Adams.  The hottest artist in the early 70s, a book with his artwork immediately raised the price of any back issue.  I would buy a comic just for 1 cover or pin-up with his work on it.

Wally Wood.  Master of pen and ink and highly detailed imagination.  He should have worked more and met a very tragic end.

Frank Frazetta.  He sold me on Conan and Warren Magazines like Vampirella with his paintings alone.

Gene Colan.  Master of shadows and light, Colan's greatest problem was that inkers misunderstood him.  When he teamed with Tom Palmer on Doctor Strange and Tomb of Dracula, he had someone who understood how to render his pencils.  Colan's Daredevil was also top notch.

Barry Smith.  Started out as a Kirby clone and over the years morphed into one of the finest fantasy artists around.  His swan song on Red Nails is one of the best conceived Conan stories ever done.

Alex Toth.  Shadows and light, Toth was a master of that as well as story telling.  His work was few and far between but I'll always remember his work on Hot Wheels, Black Canary, and this Batman story from Detective Comics #442.

John Buscema.  He hated superheroes but at times like this one (Silver Surfer #4) he drew them so damn well.  His work on Conan was his real love and pushed that title to new heights.

Joe Kubert.  His work drew me to the Edgar Rice Burroughs works like Tarzan, but later I had much fun collecting his run on Enemy Ace.  A Kubert comic was an escape from the world of superheroes into worlds of adventure. 

Jim Aparo.  His brooding style of artwork made Phantom Stranger come alive and Brave and the Bold worth getting no matter who the co-star was.  A solid artist who seemingly never missed a deadline.

Howard Chaykin.  I had followed Chaykin throughout many titles in the 1970s: The Scorpion, Cody Starbuck, Dominic Fortune, the Star Wars adaption, and Stars My Destination.  I could never figure out why he wasn't a superstar, then when American Flagg came out I was not only thrilled to read it but to see it was a big hit.

Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez.  Whoever discovered Lopez for DC Comics (was it Joe Orlando?) made a find akin to a huge gold deposit.  He could draw any of DC's characters in an elegant and exciting manner.  It was the video game tie-in Atari Force that gave me the biggest thrill, followed by his work on Cinder & Ashe and Twilight.

Hard to name just 15!  Let's make it 17.  

I would have to also add...Berni Wrightson.  His work on Swamp Thing, various stories for Warren Magazines Creepy / Eerie, plus his Frankenstein portfolio were all superb.

...and Will Eisner.  Eisner made the streets of Central City drip with water, slime, and corruption in the Spirit.  Logoforms with the Spirit letters on title pages, femme fatales, and lots of humor.  The fact that I got turned onto this work in the 1970s was a little gift from Jim Warren's magazines.

Heck, I probably should have included Walt Simonson, too. 

I think if you look at my choices, they all have very distinctive styles.  No one is really trying to copy each other, although many of them did have the same influences, such as Milton Caniff, Hal Foster, and other newspaper comic strip artists.  Most of them were in their prime during the late 60s and 1970s, with Chaykin being the exception to that--he really hit his stride with American Flagg in the 1980s.  

These were honestly the first guys who came to mind--the artists I encountered before I turned thirteen.  Funny that this list didn't include any 80s artists that I admired like Frank Miller, John Byrne, Michael Golden, Art Adams, etc.  Nuff Said!

Gil Kane & Alex Toth on Johnny Thunder original art cover

Alex Toth fans are probably well aware of his work on DC's Johnny Thunder character in the 1950s.  I am not that familiar with DC's western heroes, outside of Tomahawk and Super Chief.  But here is a unique cover featuring both Gil Kane and Toth on the inks.

All Star Western #122, published in 1951.  A real Zorro vibe to this cover.  On the surface, it looks like Toth did the whole thing.  You've got to want to buy this comic just based on the cover, a cowboy like Johnny Thunder using a fencing sword instead of a gun to rescue that girl behind him.

I recently found the cover pencils on Heritage Comics.  Here you can see it was a fully pencilled Gil Kane cover.  This is interesting in a number of ways.  You can see early on in his career, Kane was really all about drawing action in a very fluid manner, a trademark of his style that lasted decades.  Now I am wondering, was he influenced in this style by Toth?  Also, note the way he added the shadows with very detailed pencils, something that I don't recall seeing in Kane's 70s covers.

After Toth added the inks, the faces of the figures were transformed into his signature look.    I wonder if these two worked on other western covers?

I did a quick search to see what history these men had together, and from what I read on Comic Book Resources forum, it wasn't an easy relationship.  Nuff Said!

Buscema, Adams, Kubert, Garcia-Lopez, Kane on a Silver-Bronze Age Jam!

I love finding comic art jams where a die-hard fan was able to get the most famous comic artists to draw characters together in one big illustration.  Last year I featured one with Wrightson, Ditko, Infantino and many more great artists.

This one features a number of equally great artists.  Here is a rundown:

• Wendy Pini - Elfquest
• Joe Kubert - Hawkman
• Rudy Nebres - Doctor Strange
• Frank Thorne - Red Sonja (modeled on Wendy Pini?)
• José Luis García-López - Deadman
• Neal Adams - Conan the Barbarian, note Roy Thomas' signature next to Adams
• Gil Kane - John Carter, Warlord of Mars Gulliver Jones, Warrior of Mars!
• Dave Cockrum - Sun Boy Human Torch (Golden Age)
• Ross Andru & Bob Layton - Sub-Mariner
• Dick Dillin & Dave Hunt - The Flash
• John Buscema & Joe Sinnott - Silver Surfer

An impressive piece!  Martin Greim has to have been the original owner.  The fact that the owner got these inkers is also remarkable.  Who knew Bob Layton inking Ross Andru would be such a great combination?  Nuff Said!

Gil Kane and Murphy Anderson Original Art from Green Lantern #74

Some of the first Green Lantern comics I remember reading were from 1968-1970, when Gil Kane and Murphy Anderson were the art team.




Issues #73 and #74 featured Sinestro and the return of Star Sapphire and featured this dynamic double page spread of the two adversaries fighting above the beaches of Coast City.  This two-part story had everything—action, romance, agony—and for a while it looked like Carol Ferris was going to wipe Sinestro on the ocean floor.



The Gil Kane Unchained page on Facebook recently posted the original art to this splash page, and it looks terrific.  Gil Kane’s crazy camera angles really made an airborne fight scene look like no other comic book.  Anderson’s ink style was very smooth and polished.  You have to go back and re-read these comics while playing Donovan’s Sunshine Superman in the background.  Nuff Said!

Green Lantern in San Francisco

The Green Lantern marketing machine is firing on all cylinders in the city of San Francisco.  Billboards can be seen on many Muni and AC Transit buses and in the BART station.  Yesterday as I was walking on Howard street, I noticed this giant mural painted on the side of a building and took this shot with my phone.  The entire GL corps staring down at the citizens of SF!  Very colorful.  I believe this was near the intersection of Howard and 1st street.

I was walking towards the Comic Art Museum of San Francisco, at 655 Mission street.  They are having a special Green Lantern original comic art exhibit in conjunction with the movie and you can view artwork by Gil Kane, Joe Staton, Mike Grell, and many others.  I really enjoyed viewing the original art to Green Lantern #61 by Gil Kane.  This is one of the early silver age titles that drew me to the character, along with the mention of his name in Donavan’s song Sunshine Superman.  There is one wall devoted to all the original art for this particular issue.  The card to the right said the art was displayed with the permission of Mike Friedrich (a long time Bay Area resident), the writer on this issue.

The museum decorated one wall of the exhibit with a blown up recreation of Darwyn Cooke’s rendition of Green Lantern, taken from New Frontiers.  It’s a small but cool exhibit, which costs $7 for admission.  There is only 1 Neal Adams piece, but it is a doozy—the cover to Green Lantern #85, the Speedy heroin drug issue.  What surprised me more than anything are 2 Mike Grell pages from the upcoming DC Retroactive special—stunning pages that show Grell has lost none of excellent technique.  Nuff Said!

Cover Progression: Amazing Spider-Man #150 by Gil Kane

From time to time I like to display cover progressions, from sketch to final cover, and it’s always great when I find stuff from the Silver Age of Comics.  Here is a nice one, from Amazing Spider-Man #150 in 1975.



The cover was by Gil Kane, who drew the interior story penned by Archie Goodwin.  The above image was the cover prelim.  I am not sure if this was actually used at Marvel back in 1975, or was the cover sketch below just placed under the cover copy by a fan?



I believe this image was the actual cover sketch idea by Kane.  The pose that Kane frames Spider-Man in is a classic one for the artist, showing the hero in “mental agony” as he is besieged by the members of his rogues gallery.  They are all just demons in his own mind.




The final cover in full color.  This wondrous 150th issue was a real landmark, though we wouldn’t realize it until 250 issues in the future when the Clone Saga began.  After fighting his own clone in the previous issue, Peter Parker asked the question, am I the original or carbon copy?  He tore up the results of the analysis and took the answer on faith, which came back to bite him in the end.  Lesson learned: don’t accept faith, always get it in writing!

Check out the Gil Kane Unchained page on Facebook for more sketches!  Nuff Said.

Shootout in the Old West with the Rawhide Kid, courtesy of Gil Kane

I just saw a scan for this cover to Rawhide Kid #140, circa 1977, a really great Western style shootout with the Kid scrambling for cover at the corner store.  Great design and execution on this cover by Kane!  Wish he drew the interior story, but alas, it was a reprint.

Jeremy over at ComicArtFans owns the original art to this page.  Stunning in black and white, what a lucky geek!

Take a look at a few other Kane western covers: Duck! Gil Kane's Cover for Kid Colt 200! as well as Marvels of Gil Kane: Mighty Marvel Western covers.  Nuff Said!

Tarzan by Archie Goodwin and Gil Kane

I’ve been reading comics for a long time and my knowledge of the mainstream is pretty deep.  Yet every once in a while I stumble upon something old that is new.  A perfect example is this, Tarzan Sunday newspaper strips by Archie Goodwin and Gil Kane—I had no idea that they ever worked on this character!  The strip above, from July 1979, kicked off a storyline titled The Runaway, about a spoiled brat who gets lost in the jungle.  It’s up to Tarzan to save his butt and teach him a few valuable lessons about life.



The strips all have storylines that played out over a few months of Sundays.  The other storyline I read, titled Zugor the Ape, features Tarzan in New York City.  I was blown away by the craftsmanship of these strips.  The stories by Goodwin are well paced and suited for an all ages audience.  The artwork by Gil Kane plays to his strengths, giving him a chance to draw plenty of action from interesting perspectives.  Take a look at the bridge sequence here, very smart use of angle shots in small panels.  Click on the link below for more Tarzan strips.  Nuff Said!

Link: Gil Kane Unchained page on Facebook

The Flame Horse by Gil Kane

Here is a poster that I found while perusing an old issue of Jim Steranko’s MediaScene (issue 16 from 1975).  The Flame Horse, by Gil Kane.  I had the idea that this was a new original work by Kane, who had previously published his independent creation, Blackmark.  But I don’t think this ever appeared anywhere, unless Kane re-worked the material into something else.  Let me know if you have more details.  Meanwhile, the poster presents a glorious scene of Swords, Sorcery, and Science.  What a cocktail that would have been!  Nuff Said.

Sword of the Atom by Gil Kane

One of the series that Gil Kane drew for DC Comics in the early 1980s was Sword of the Atom.  This is one of those gems that I didn't quite like when it came out.  But now I love it--the setting really provided a fertile ground for Kane's illustrations.



Amazing Heroes previewed the mini-series in 1983 with this terrific Kane cover.  Kane always did a great job with sword & sorcery.  The story by Jan Strnad put Ray Palmer's marriage to Jean Loring in turmoil and sent the hero into a microverse populated by barbarians.



The first mini-series sent die-hard silver age Atom fans into a tizzy.  I remember reading this and thinking, but yeah, where's the JLA?  Of course, that was the whole point, to reinvent the Atom and send him off into another world.



Reading this stuff all over again, it was clear that Gil Kane loved this story and did some very inspired work.  After the first mini-series finished, there were 3 more specials that were published in 1984/85/86. This splash page was from the 1984 special, where Ray Palmer reflects on his feelings between the Jean and barbarian babe Laethwen.  If only the Atom could know of Jean's future actions in Identity Crisis...he would have stayed in that microverse forever. Nuff Said!

The Final Days of Green Lantern Vol 2 with Gil Kane

Green Lantern Volume Two--the one starring Hal Jordan--had a terrific run during the 1980s.  Len Wein, Dave Gibbons, and Steve Englehart worked on the series during this period.  John Stewart even became the lead character for a period of time.  But it started winding down and losing sales despite the array of talent.

Green Lantern #167 has Jordan with his finger raised as he stands among the Guardians of the Universe.  This cover epitomizes the greatest thing about Jordan's character.  He's a Galactic cop reporting to the ultimate authority, but Jordan's always been rebellious, never afraid to the Guardians when they've made a bonehead decision.

In this run of stories, the writers had discovered the mythology surrounding the GL Corps was a goldmine of material.  The series changed its title to "The Green Lantern Corps" with issue 201 in an effort to boost sales.

The GL Corps only lasted 24 issues.  It was fitting that Gil Kane, the man who worked on the first issue back in the 1960s, drew the final cover to GL Corps #224.  After an epic battle with Sinestro, the great power battery of the Corps was left "diminished but not extinguished" in the words of the lone surviving Guardian.  There was enough power left to equip Jordan with a ring.  The rest of the Corps were powerless and dispersed to live normal lives. 

This cover is a fitting tribute to the end of the series, with Jordan saluting the battery and his friends in a state of shock.  Nuff said.

Silver Age Green Lantern, from the year 2000, by Gil Kane

This cover was for the special "Silver Age" mini-event in 2000.  I saved this image of the cover, sans the logo and captions, from one of the DC solicitations.  Kevin Nowlan inked this cover and many other jobs that Kane worked on during this period.  I really like the color scheme in this version--Sinestro in a blue haze raining down trouble on Hal Jordan, which the green circles focus your attention on.

Apparently someone at DC Comics did not like that color scheme.  Here's the actual published cover.  Perhaps the editorial change was to restore Sinestro's purplish skin color as it appears in the interiors.  However, they made a mistake with this new color scheme--Sinestro's ring is emitting green energy, not yellow!  Nuff said.

Green Lantern Gallery 1996 cover jam by Gil Kane, Marty Nodell, Daryl Banks

DC Comics Final Night mini-series was published in 1996--which killed off Hal Jordan (as Parallax) in the concluding chapter.  As we all know, Hal Jordan never left the DC Universe, he was always around as the Spectre until Green Lantern: Rebirth.  As a memorial tribute to the hero they maligned, DC published a special "Green Lantern Gallery", loaded with pin-ups of the Silver Age Green Lantern.  This cover jam was a real treat, featuring three generations of Green Lanterns, drawn by the artists who created them!  Gil Kane on Hal Jordan, Marty Nodell on Alan Scott, and Daryl Banks on Kyle Rayner.  All of them topped off with inks by the great Kevin Nowlan.  What a cover, whoever owns this one is very lucky!  Nuff said.

Green Lantern 1970 DC Comics ad: To Do Or Die?

One thing I noticed only after posting yesterday's look at various Green Lantern covers by Gil Kane was how many of them teased the reader with the death of Hal Jordan!

I always loved the DC Comics ads that paired up two characters.  Sometimes the pairings were illogical!  I remember seeing this ad for GL #70 and Detective Comics #395.  They got me with this one, I bought them both.  Nuff said.

Green Lantern 1980s covers by Gil Kane

Gil Kane returned to the Green Lantern character in the 1980s.  Here are a few of my favorite covers from this period.  There's a subtle theme here:

Green Lantern #166 features Hal Jordan in the foreground, with a green energy construct in the background that resembles himself!  Self-love is the greatest love of all.  The construct must have been drawn on a separate plate/overlay to achieve that color effect.

Green Lantern #171 is another iconic pose with Hal Jordan's face in the background.  This time the background is an orange-red color.

Green Lantern #177 works the best, as Hal Jordan recharges in an all green background.

It's interesting to me that Gil Kane had such a long history with Green Lantern.  He co-created the created in 1959, drew him exclusively for the first 10 years, and later returned for covers and specials in the 1980s and 90s.  Nuff said.

Gil Kane Green Lantern Covers

We're doing a Gil Kane cover retrospective on Giant-Size Marvel, but here on Giant-Size Geek, we like to concentrate on DC material.  Here are 4 silver age Green Lantern covers from 1968-1970 that made an impression on me as a kid.

By the time I had seen Green Lantern #61 advertised, I had already learned about Earth-2 and the Golden Age Green Lantern from Justice League reprints.  This image of Hal Jordan castigating blame on Alan Scott reminded me of a wrathful God.  I wanted to buy any book that had one of the Earth-2 Justice Society heroes in it.

The cover to Green Lantern #70 confused me--I mistakenly thought the guy standing over GL was Elongated Man.  That really looks like Ralph Dibny, doesn't it?  My nose twitched and I bought the comic only to be disappointed.  But I still love the people gathered around GL in a kind of existential despair.

Green Lantern #73 was unique at the time because of the purplish color scheme, leaving no doubt that this story featured the return of Star Sapphire.  Hal Jordan looks very afraid on this cover, doesn't he?  Maybe he had more than just a weakness to the color yellow.  This was the first of a two-part story.

Green Lantern #74 featured the conclusion, with Sinestro joining Sapphire to beat down Hal Jordan.  The sight of a depleted GL with his friend Tom Kalmaku urging him to recharge before his arch enemy advances--made this another must-have book.  These were the last few GL comics drawn by Kane until Neal Adams took over in issue 76.  Kane would later return to the character in the 1980s.

Whenever I see these Gil Kane Green Lantern comics, I always think of Donovan's 1966 song, Sunshine Superman.  It was played frequently during the summer of 1969 when I briefly lived in Los Angeles.  I thought Superman and Green Lantern were two of the finest heroes on Earth, to be immortalized in a song!  You can view my new Gil Kane gallery on Flickr. Nuff said.