Thursday, May 24, 2012

Gorham-Bait (Avengers edition)

Interesting article on how to (and how NOT to) reprint a comic book. I bought the Marvel Masterworks edition of "The Avengers" 1-10 years ago, and I always thought the art looked fishy....

This article says (and I think I'm the last to learn this), that those terrible Marvel people REDREW the original art (Kirby, Heck, Ditko, et al). Is that true? (Jimmy will set us right on this....)

I think the biggest problem with the reprints comes from the garish coloring (paging Marie Severin!). Here's a link to an original page from Avengers no. 5. It looks like a lot of the wonkiness is from the inking (so claims the Kirby site, and as a fan, I will agree with them--although really, can inking explain the way that Hulk looks at the end of his transform??).

But hey, even bad re-drawing can't hide the impact and originality of a panel like The Evil Avengers!

3 comments:

MrGoodson2 said...

It was good to be guided to that Kirby-love page. I've been there before. Now I may spend a big part of the day there. I think the guy that was prone to going ballistic when people drew into his originals was Ditko. Kirby no doubt didn't like it either. Ditko was always, "Oh yeah." with Marvel. Working for Charlton, doing stuff that looked so weird but still so Marvel.

JMG said...

"This article says (and I think I'm the last to learn this), that those terrible Marvel people REDREW the original art (Kirby, Heck, Ditko, et al). Is that true? (Jimmy will set us right on this....)"

Hell if I know but it's possible. I know for lots of the Old covers from things like Tales to Astonish (The creature stuff) Came out as reprints years later in titles like Creatures on the Loose, had altered art on the covers, so it's possible they hacked the inside art too from the originals. I can just bet they made PMT prints and inked on those and pasted them in. Some stuff looks like it.

Davis Chino said...

Jimmy!