Favorite Marvel Silver Age Artist?

ourchair

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I know most of us are in our teens and twenties here, but I just wanted to know if anybody here has developed an appreciation for the Silver Age artists of Marvel. Beyond of course, the regular lip service paid to Kirby, Romita, Ditko, et al within discussions of Marvel's transformative effect on superhero comics.

See, I was flipping through some of the books in my library and got a little spell bound by some of the work that was being produced forty years ago and remembered how impressed I am with some of the artists of the early 'Marvel Age' and thought, "Does anybody have a favorite Silver Age artist"?

For me it's Spider-Man co-creator and artist Steve Ditko. Say what you want about the undeniably awesome Jack Kirby, but Ditko gets my respect for the amount of detail and character he put into his work on Amazing Spider-Man and Dr. Strange.

Sure, Ditko's put out some weird stuff like Squirrel Girl, but then again, so did Jack. But what amazes me is the atmosphere he gave to his linework. Just the way he layered each page almost as if they were wood carvings, and the quirky detail he put into his faces just wows me.

Kirby has this sensational and dazzling allure to him, to be certain, but what took away from some of his work is the fact that a great variety of people inked his pencils and that lack of consistency was glaring and made some of his issues of Fantastic Four suffer.

Ditko, on the other hand, inked his own work, and it's a pleasure to behold. It makes me sad that he wasn't as prolific as Jack, but then again, who is? Even then, the relatively small amount of work he did for Marvel is disappointing if you want more of it, but on the other hand, I guess that's how he got away with such detail.
 
I can't stand the silver age artists. It ruins the entire thing for me. Plus it all looks the same to me. I love the art now a days.
 
TGO, I understand what you talk about, the artwork on most of the 60's was...primitive compared to modern art styles, but I hope you still respect them for making the backbone for modern comic art.

My favioarte artist has to be John Buscema. Many people tend to overlook him since he came a little after kirby and Ditko in entering the herorealm, but Buscema was a master of design. He knew how to draw pages that related to the action going on. If a character was of a grand scale he would give him a large panel to move around in. If a villain was all-powerful, the reader was always looking up at the villain, as if they were an inferior.

buscema.gif


This is just one great example of his great work on Conan. The best part about John was how good his art looked uncolored, so at least to me, the essential with him in it were gold. Well there was my silver age artist praise for the day.
 
Kirby on Fantastic Four, hands down.
 
Originally posted by UltimatE
Kirby on Fantastic Four, hands down.

Speaking of that; E, have you mangaed to pick up the Jack Kirby Visionaries, if so what do you think [I loved it], and if not, why not!?
 
Ultxon said:
Speaking of that; E, have you mangaed to pick up the Jack Kirby Visionaries, if so what do you think [I loved it], and if not, why not!?

I don't think I've seen it. Is it a hardcover? When did it come out?
 
It took a while, but I've really started to appreciate Jack Kirby. He truly was great. Neal Adams is great, too. :D
 
Ultxon said:
TGO, I understand what you talk about, the artwork on most of the 60's was...primitive compared to modern art styles, but I hope you still respect them for making the backbone for modern comic art.
I agree with you, Buscema is just awesome. I was looking at a pencilled page of his last night in which he did a Daredevil cover I think, and it was absolutely freaking fantastic. It probably looked better before it got inked and colored.

But I disagree with the idea that the art of the 60s is "primitive". I know you're not saying they are inferior, but to me "primitive" implies a lack of technical meticulousness, the kind we recognize in say Jim Lee or Bryan Hitch. And to say that the 60s artists were not meticulate is bull. I mean Gene Colan, Neal Adams and John Buscema certainly sweated over every line.

Interestingly enough, I was looking at the Buscema page you scanned in before reading your post and I was like, "Whoa! Unused art from Wolverine: Origin! Or is it 1602?"

...

I just compared young gun Andy Kubert to the great John Buscema. I'm going to fanboy hell.
 
moonmaster said:
It took a while, but I've really started to appreciate Jack Kirby. He truly was great. Neal Adams is great, too. :D
Neal Adams is fantastic, he's got such a good sense of mood going for a lot of his Marvel and DC work.

Not that it matters, but I think his cultural weight and artistic cache within comicdom would've been much more significant if he didn't run around making dumb crap like Valeria the She-Bat back then.
 
But I disagree with the idea that the art of the 60s is "primitive". I know you're not saying they are inferior, but to me "primitive" implies a lack of technical meticulousness, the kind we recognize in say Jim Lee or Bryan Hitch. And to say that the 60s artists were not meticulate is bull. I mean Gene Colan, Neal Adams and John Buscema certainly sweated over every line.

Interestingly enough, I was looking at the Buscema page you scanned in before reading your post and I was like, "Whoa! Unused art from Wolverine: Origin! Or is it 1602?"

Yeah, you are right. I just misused the word primitive. Primitive would be the caveman drawings or something. I would say that the 60s marvel artists were skilled craftftsmen who createxd some awe inspiring art. As I said they created created the backbone of marvel. You also have to realzie that people like Kirby and Ditko were spitting out masterpices lefta and right. Just look at all the titles Kirby was drawing and imagine if an artist today had to live up to current artists musts and draw that many titles. That's why I respect them, they really outdid themselves for that age.
 
Ultxon said:
You also have to realzie that people like Kirby and Ditko were spitting out masterpices lefta and right. Just look at all the titles Kirby was drawing and imagine if an artist today had to live up to current artists musts and draw that many titles. That's why I respect them, they really outdid themselves for that age.
Minor correction: Ditko wasn't exactly known for having the prolific output that Kirby did.

But about Kirby, I think what was awesome about him was that he scaled down his detail but never ever lost any energy and dynamism in his pages; each one absolutely sizzled. It was reputed that during the Silver Age, he almost never did a draft. If someone told him to do a cover, he'd just sit down and draw it with little to no planning, almost as if each piece was a song he was composing on the spot by ear.

A lot of that has to do with the fact that Kirby was a responsible-minded family man, and he was trying very hard to support that family in spite of the slump that comics was in at the time. Economic pressure forced him to be able to do as many books as he could, and that's probably how he developed that skill.
 
Minor correction: Ditko wasn't exactly known for having the prolific output that Kirby did.

You are absolutly right. Super-Hero wise, I can only thing of two he did continuosuly; spidey and Dr. Strange.
 
Gene Colan gets overlooked a lot, simply because he was more of a journeyman and 'company guy', so he never really became associated with any one partiuclar character or team. But the guy left his unique mark on a diverse set of characters, from Cap to Howard the Duck to freaking Dracula, and that kind of variety certainly deserves recognition!

And I know a lot of people give Jim Steranko sh!t on account of his dismissive attitude to comics art later on, but his work really pushed the medium to seriously integrate aspects of high art AND commercial design into the basic sequential story-telling.
 
compound said:
And I know a lot of people give Jim Steranko sh!t on account of his dismissive attitude to comics art later on, but his work really pushed the medium to seriously integrate aspects of high art AND commercial design into the basic sequential story-telling.

I forgot about Steranko. For the short time he worked in comics, he kicked a whole lot of ***.
 
moonmaster said:
I forgot about Steranko. For the short time he worked in comics, he kicked a whole lot of ***.
Steranko's use of visual sexual innuendo was nothing short of awe-inspiring. It's like bypassing the filter on UC, only much cooler.
 

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