Today through May 29, Jim Steranko has an exhibit of his paintings at the Butler Institute of American Art, in Youngstown, Ohio.
I must take strong exception to the curator’s statement that Stan Lee considered Steranko to be “his best,” and “his right-hand man, in a way.” That distinction, without question, belonged to Jack Kirby.
Correction: Wendy Swick is not the curator, she is the Public Relations Coordinator at the museum.
The Sunday Boston Globe magazine celebrated the paper’s 150th anniversary. Two pages were devoted to a bit of comic page history. I was amused to see the Globe had a local comic strip drawn by a William J. Sinnott.
My Economics advisor at the small college I attended liked teaching there because he could express his views on Political Economy without getting in trouble. Avoiding trouble is also the reason I prefer having my old weblog to posting on fan forums.
Some of the controversies regarding classic comic books concern the various combinations of pencil artists and inkers. Here is an excellent comparison of original pencil art to finished inks.
Frank Giacoia was a top-notch professional. His direct and distinctive inking style was unmistakable, while adhering to the original pencils. Stan Lee often credited Joe Sinnott as “Embellisher,” rather than as an inker. On the left is a face drawn by Jack Kirby that Frank inked, and on the right is the same character as inked by Joe.
A few years separate these two examples. In that time Jack had adjusted his drawing to accommodate the switch to smaller original art — from 12″x16″ to 10″x15″ — but I think it’s still a valid comparison.
Joe said he sometimes felt he put too much of his own style on Jack’s faces. But Stan brought Joe back to Marvel to ink “The World’s Greatest Comic Magazine” for a reason. As I liked to tell Joe, his “friendly faces” were the very thing that got me started reading the Fantastic Four. Here’s a picture I took looking over Joe’s shoulder as he drew Superman for a fan five years ago. As you can see, Joe inked exactly the same way that he drew.
Stan said he liked to see how artists handled mundane, everyday scenes. Here’s a panel from a Captain America story, half of it taken up with Stan’s dialogue, that shows how perfectly Joe enhanced Jack’s art, adding expressive subtlety to the faces.
I grabbed this photo from a Facebook group.
Been too busy to switch mental gears back to my now fully up-to-date WordPress installation, but here’s something I can post quickly, that I know will interest at least one of you. It’s a documentary about master comic book artist and designer Alex Toth. Almost as much time is spent discussing his difficult personality as his art.
Oh, the effort and difficulty it took getting Google to even list this site again, let alone accept a sitemap to index its contents:
Once again I lay blame on Bluehost for changes it made, causing all of the problems I have struggled to resolve. There are numerous quirks — especially with pre-fix posts — but most of the serious issues seem to have been cracked, and only because I switched from feeling annoyed to remembering why I started Prattling Before the Pratfall. It was originally intended purely as a learning curve challenge, with no expectation of continuing for more than 15 years. But now that I’m retired from a high tech career, a technical challenge is perhaps a good thing.
I’d better acknowledge the late Harlan Ellison for this post’s title, with the names of the world’s two busiest web sites. Harlan always — and I mean always — wanted to receive his due credit:
