Tag Archives: Silver Age

The Adventures of Santa Claus

Here’s one that’s been in my head since last Christ­mas, but there was too much going on then for me to get to it in time. So it feels good to final­ly get this real­ized this year!

I’ve always had a soft spot for those DC 80 Pg. Giants and 100 Pg. Super-Spec­tac­u­lars, and the idea of a some­what super­hero-style San­ta Claus 80 Pg. Giant com­ic sound­ed like a fun idea that need­ed to exist. And it’s a giv­en that Go-Go Checks auto­mat­i­cal­ly make any com­ic cov­er better!

Of course, there were a lot of pos­si­ble vil­lains to pick from, but ulti­mate­ly I grav­i­tat­ed towards these. For those who don’t know, Pitch comes from the 1959 Mex­i­can movie San­ta Claus. Voldar and Torg appear in the 1964 “clas­sic” San­ta Claus Con­quers the Mar­tians. The Heat Miser and the Snow Miser show up in the TV spe­cial, The Year With­out a San­ta Claus. And final­ly, Oogie Boo­gie comes from the Dis­ney clas­sic The Night­mare Before Christ­mas. Just real­ized: they’re all in chrono­log­i­cal order. I had­n’t real­ly planned it that way (I was think­ing more about even­ly dis­trib­ut­ing the reds and greens), but so be it!

That’s about all I can think of to say for this image, except: I’d like to wish all my site vis­i­tors a Mer­ry Christ­mas and a Hap­py New Year!

One More for the Road!

Recent vis­i­tors to my site in August will know that I was doing the online Jack Kir­by Trib­ute every day, the brain­child of Howard Simp­son. it was a blast par­tic­i­pat­ing, refresh­ing my appre­ci­a­tion all over again for all the great work Kir­by did over the years.

I stuck to a very spe­cif­ic for­mat with all of these: por­traits in a small square, col­ored with the lim­it­ed palette used in the old comics most of these char­ac­ters orig­i­nal­ly appeared in, even down to the dot pat­terns. And I had in mind that the end goal was to be able to assem­ble them all into one com­pos­ite image. I was­n’t sure how that would work out, but here’s how it did!

This was kind of just a per­son­al challenge/exercise in tak­ing the Trib­ute a step fur­ther. Not sure what hap­pens with it beyond this point.

Hope you enjoyed the ride!

This Is Rather Challenging…

We’re now at Day 12 of Howard Simp­son’s month-long online cel­e­bra­tion of Kir­by, in hon­or of the fact Kir­by was born in August! It’s open to all cre­atives, and you can find the work on your favorite social media plat­forms by using the hash­tag #Kir­b­yArt­Trib­ut­es.

Today’s prompt? The Chal­lengers of the Unknown! It’s my under­stand­ing that this was a left­over con­cept from Kir­by’s ear­li­er part­ner­ship with Joe Simon. As real­ized in the pages of DC’s Show­case #6 (on news­stands in Novem­ber of ’56), the char­ac­ters’ ori­gin might sound a lit­tle famil­iar: four peo­ple attempt­ing an aer­i­al voy­age that end­ed in a crash land­ing which could/should have killed them. But they sur­vived, and came away with a great­ly changed out­look on their lives and their pur­pose mov­ing forward.

The ini­tial install­ments in Show­case were writ­ten by Dave Wood (no rela­tion to Wal­ly Wood). Sales were such that after four install­ments there, the Chal­lengers got their own title by ear­ly 1958. Accord­ing to the cred­its in DC’s Archive Edi­tion reprints, Kir­by actu­al­ly wrote some of the ear­ly scripts in the reg­u­lar title himself.

The strip also fea­tured inks by Wal­ly Wood on many install­ments. Wood was an amaz­ing tal­ent all on his own, and if you’ve nev­er seen Kir­by and Wood paired togeth­er, you might find it hard to imag­ine how it could pos­si­bly work. But it does, and amaz­ing­ly well! It’s like you get the best of both artists: the life, ener­gy and imag­i­na­tion of Kir­by’s pen­cils, with the light­ing and nat­u­ral­ism of Wood’s fin­ish­es. If you’ve nev­er seen their pair­ing, you owe it to your­self to check it out.

Hope you enjoy my salute to Kir­by’s Chal­lengers. And stay tuned!

Larger Than Life

It’s now Day 10 of Howard Simp­son’s month-long cel­e­bra­tion of Jack Kir­by! Open to all cre­atives, you should be able to find the work being gen­er­at­ed on your favorite social media plat­forms by the hash­tag #Kir­b­yArt­Trib­ut­es.

Today’s prompt is Galac­tus. He first appeared in the pages of Fan­tas­tic Four, in prob­a­bly one of the best-loved and remem­bered sto­ries of that book, known by most fans as the Galac­tus trilogy.

The Fan­tas­tic Four car­ried the tag “The World’s Great­est Com­ic Mag­a­zine” on its cov­ers. While it was most­ly Stan Lee play­ful­ly doing pro­mo­tion­al hype, more often than not dur­ing the book’s ini­tial run  by Kir­by and Lee, it was truth in adver­tis­ing. Galac­tus as a char­ac­ter was some­thing very dif­fer­ent. I don’t think any­thing like him had ever been seen before in a super­hero com­ic. Not just a street thug or a reg­u­lar human guy in a super suit, he was more a force of nature, vir­tu­al­ly god­like. He pre­sent­ed a real chal­lenge to the sto­ry­tellers. How can you defeat an antag­o­nist like that?

Sur­pris­ing­ly, I real­ized this is the first time I’ve ever attempt­ed to draw Galac­tus! I’m not gonna lie; it was a lit­tle intim­i­dat­ing to tack­le him. His visu­al, while there are cer­tain con­sis­ten­cies, also fluc­tu­ates a great deal from com­ic to com­ic. Even his col­or­ing seems to change over his appearances!

Any­way, I felt like he came out okay, to my relief. Hope you enjoy it, and hope­ful­ly you might stop in here again tomorrow!

Surfin’ Is the Only Life, the Only Life for me, Now Surf…Surf…

Here’s Day 9 of Howard Simp­son’s month-long online Kir­by Cel­e­bra­tion, dur­ing Kir­by’s birth month of August. Open to all cre­atives, you should be able to find oth­er peo­ple’s work on your favorite social media plat­forms by the hash­tag #Kir­b­yArt­Trib­ut­es.

Today’s prompt is the Sil­ver Surfer, who first appeared in Fan­tas­tic Four dur­ing what may be that book’s best-loved and remem­bered sto­ry­line, the Galac­tus tril­o­gy. He was­n’t any­thing that was in any plot that Stan Lee and Jack Kir­by had dis­cussed, and Stan else­where has acknowl­edged that he was sur­prised when he ini­tial­ly saw the pen­ciled pages to dis­cov­er him. Jack explained that he felt a char­ac­ter as con­cep­tu­al­ly big and god­like as Galac­tus ought to have some kind of her­ald to accom­pa­ny and pre­cede him, hence the Surfer.

Stan was so tak­en with the Surfer, he made him his own, and even­tu­al­ly spun him off into his own title. Not work­ing with Kir­by, but John Busce­ma. It’s a high­ly regard­ed book (and char­ac­ter), but Stan’s con­cep­tion was dif­fer­ent from what Jack orig­i­nal­ly intend­ed. Where Stan had the Surfer pre­vi­ous­ly exist­ing as Nor­rin Rad, who sac­ri­ficed him­self and his iden­ti­ty to save his plan­et, Jack thought of the Surfer as a being who was basi­cal­ly cre­at­ed out of noth­ing, and was learn­ing as he trav­eled. That’s def­i­nite­ly how things read in his ini­tial appear­ance as part of the Galac­tus trilogy.

Any­way, I hope you enjoy my shot at the Surfer. Tune in again tomorrow…

Drawn in Quarters

A con­fes­sion: I have a bit of a soft spot for some of the more odd­ball comics char­ac­ters out there. This won’t come as any big sur­prise to those of you who’ve vis­it­ed this site reg­u­lar­ly, but there you go. And they don’t get much odd­er than Ultra, the Multi-Alien.

Ultra was a late arrival to DC’s Mys­tery in Space com­ic. His ori­gin is all but spelled out on the cov­er of his first appear­ance, which I’ve re-cre­at­ed here. DC had some­thing of a tra­di­tion of sci fi/space heroes, and Ultra def­i­nite­ly fit into that tra­di­tion. He starts off in this first sto­ry as space­man Ace Arn, from Earth. These four aliens, from the plan­ets Ulla, Laroo, Tra­go and Raa­gan, each have spe­cial ray guns, designed to trans­form who­ev­er they fire them on into a mem­ber of their own respec­tive alien species. This being will then be under the con­trol of the one who shot them. Don’t ask me to explain why this is a goal to be desired. I don’t know; I’m get­ting con­fused typ­ing this.

Ace Arn is forced to crash-land on the plan­et where these four aliens are hid­ing out. And (by a fur­ther stroke of fate or coin­ci­dence only pos­si­ble in comics) all four fire their guns at him at the exact same instant, caus­ing him to be trans­formed par­tial­ly into being like all of them. Only con­trary to their plans, he retains his own will, and abrupt­ly rounds up the bad guys, some­how instant­ly know­ing how to use all these pow­ers he nev­er had before. Tak­ing the first let­ter from the names of each of their plan­ets (Ulla, Laroo, Trago and Raagan), he adds an “A” for his own name, tak­ing on a new iden­ti­ty as Ultra. I did say this was odd, did­n’t I?

The art for the strip was cre­at­ed by Lee Elias. About 20 years ear­li­er, he had done real­ly great work for Har­vey Comics on their Black Cat com­ic (I took a shot at the char­ac­ter myself here). I have no inside aware­ness as to the think­ing behind the cre­ation of Ultra, but I do have some guess­es about it. As men­tioned, this strip appeared late in Mys­tery in Space’s run. I sus­pect sales were flag­ging, and they were look­ing for a poten­tial new “anchor” strip that would cap­ture enough read­er inter­est to bol­ster their sales.

As DC sci fi strips go, though, this was real­ly dif­fer­ent. On the face of things, Ultra was kind of a mon­ster char­ac­ter, some­thing very unlike most oth­er DC char­ac­ters. Again, guess­ing: mon­ster-mania was still very much in effect in pop cul­ture at the time. You had shows like The Mun­sters and The Addams Fam­i­ly on TV, along with all the late night mon­ster movies, mod­el kits and toys. So per­haps Ultra was an attempt to tap into some of that.

Mys­tery in Space was can­celed with issue #110, so Ultra must not have caught on with read­ers as much as DC had hoped. But there’s often some­thing fun about odd­ball char­ac­ters like Ultra, despite (or maybe because of) their odd­i­ty. I’ve always had a soft spot for the guy ever since the first time I saw him as a kid.

Hence my re-cre­ation/re-inter­pre­ta­tion. As is usu­al with any of these, I’ve made some changes. For me, that’s the only point in doing re-cre­ations, if I can find some kind of fresh spin to put on them. If you care to study it and com­pare it to the orig­i­nal, there’s one big change (that’s kind of a hint), and a num­ber of small ones too.

Hope you enjoy my lit­tle self-indul­gence here. 🙂

Captain Saturn Giant!

Some of you may rec­og­nize this as the cov­er of Odd Comics’ Cap­tain Sat­urn Giant, pub­lished in the ear­ly ’60s. Odd Comics as a pub­lish­er seems to have been large­ly for­got­ten these days, and it takes a lot of dig­ging to find their comics, but it’s worth the effort.

Okay, I con­fess: the above was a lie! It’s just a fake com­ic cov­er, by me. I’ll tell you the truth as to how this came about.

Over on LinkedIn, the very tal­ent­ed Thomas N. Perkins IV post­ed a draw­ing he’d done on the first page of a copy of his book If…. Thomas does a lot of cool stuff, but some­thing about this draw­ing par­tic­u­lar­ly caught my eye. It had a sort of Sil­ver Age-look­ing super­hero char­ac­ter, with a big mon­ster behind him. I com­ment­ed on how I liked it, and in Thomas’ reply, he said it was “Cap­tain Sat­urn and his pet Gulglammakus.”

Some­how, their being named plant­ed a seed in my brain. And sud­den­ly, I was envi­sion­ing Cap­tain Sat­urn fea­tured in a Sil­ver Age extra-length Giant com­ic. I told Thomas about this, and with his bless­ing, I went to work on this cover.

Thomas’ orig­i­nal draw­ing was in black and white with gray tones, and he want­ed to fig­ure out the col­or scheme for Cap­tain Sat­urn for me first, which I then trans­lat­ed into the Sil­ver Age comics col­or palette.

His response when I gave him a pre­view of the fin­ished cov­er was, “I won’t lie, I am sure this is a book I would’ve read as a kid.” I’m very pleased to get that kind of reac­tion. And I’ll con­fess, this is the sort of thing that would’ve caught my eye too. And prob­a­bly still would!

For a time after grad­u­at­ing col­lege, I used to have this recur­ring dream: I’d walk into a comics shop I’d nev­er been in, and dis­cov­er all these real­ly cool comics that I’d nev­er seen before! The sad part though is that I could nev­er remem­ber any­thing about them after I woke up, or maybe I’d have tried to cre­ate those comics myself. Maybe one of them might have been some­thing like Cap­tain Saturn!

Cap­tain Sat­urn is ™ & © Thomas N. Perkins IV. Thomas, thanks much for let­ting me play with your toys for a minute!

All It Takes Is a Little Will Power

Bet­ter late than never!”

—said no pro­duc­tion per­son ever in the his­to­ry of animation.

This is one of those weird ideas that popped into my head, and I felt com­pelled to get it out of there and onto paper, then final­ly into dig­i­tal form. It came to mind just before St. Patrick­’s Day, but cir­cum­stances pre­vent­ed my being able to act on it until now.

Most vis­i­tors here will know DC Comics’ Sil­ver Age ver­sion of Green Lantern. And pret­ty much every­one knows Lucky, the Lep­rechaun spokesper­son for Lucky Charms cere­al. The idea of a mashup of the two char­ac­ters just struck me as some­thing that need­ed doing. And now, I final­ly did it!

Hap­py Belat­ed St. Patrick­’s Day!

The Boop! of Frankenstein

Long time vis­i­tors to this site may recall that come Hal­loween, I have some­thing of a loose tra­di­tion of doing a Franken­stein draw­ing to celebrate.

This year, I was kind of wrack­ing my brain for inspi­ra­tion, look­ing at var­i­ous old comics cov­ers, movie stills and things, and none of the ideas I was com­ing up with were real­ly grab­bing me. Then I stum­bled across a two hour block of Fleis­ch­er Stu­dios car­toons air­ing on TCM, done by way of cel­e­brat­ing the stu­dio’s 100th anniver­sary. Watch­ing one of the Bet­ty Boop car­toons, an idea final­ly struck me that I had to do. It grew from there. This is the result.

Orig­i­nal­ly, I was just going to do the black and white image, but while work­ing on it, the thought struck me that this could also work as a com­ic book cov­er. Some of you may be won­der­ing: why make this a Gold Key cov­er par­tic­u­lar­ly? Because back in the Sil­ver Age, if you want­ed to read a com­ic fea­tur­ing a car­toon char­ac­ter, you were going to end up buy­ing a Gold Key com­ic. They had the licens­es to pret­ty much all of the char­ac­ters. Though (so far as I’ve been able to deter­mine) they nev­er actu­al­ly did a Bet­ty Boop com­ic, if any­one had pub­lished one back then, Gold Key would’ve been the publisher.

I’ve always had a gen­er­al soft spot for the “ball and rub­ber hose” school of ani­ma­tion. And more specif­i­cal­ly, I’ve always got­ten a kick out of the Fleis­ch­er Stu­dios car­toons, because they have their own per­son­al­i­ty that’s noth­ing like Dis­ney’s, Warn­er Bros., or any­one else’s. The Fleis­ch­er car­toons are chaot­ic in a fun way, where almost any­thing can hap­pen. Inan­i­mate objects come to life at a momen­t’s notice.

If you don’t know about the Fleis­ch­er Stu­dios car­toons, you real­ly should do some­thing to rec­ti­fy that. You can prob­a­bly find a num­ber of them on YouTube. They’re a real treat (no trick!).

Dad joke” free of charge. Hap­py Halloween!

Don’t Try to Con Me!”

Hm. How to explain this? It’s a par­o­dy of the cov­er of X‑Men #4, obvi­ous­ly (with all apolo­gies to Jack Kir­by!). Yes, it’s pret­ty sil­ly stuff. And there’s a rea­son I did it.

Back before I start­ed my ani­ma­tion career, I kin­da thought I was going to make comics my life’s work. I had just fin­ished get­ting as much train­ing at Art Cen­ter as I could afford on my own dime, and set about launch­ing my comics career in earnest. I hon­est­ly don’t remem­ber now exact­ly how we end­ed up cross­ing paths, but I was in con­tact with Don Chin, who was at that time pub­lish­ing comics under the names Par­o­dy Press and Enti­ty Comics. His inde­pen­dent titles were actu­al­ly doing pret­ty decent num­bers. I was­n’t going to get rich doing this work, but every career has to start some­where, right?

As you’d expect from the name, Par­o­dy Press was all about lam­poon­ing exist­ing comics. One of the projects I agreed to do for Don was a par­o­dy of the X‑Men, called X‑Cons. The book had sto­ries from sev­er­al peri­ods in the his­to­ry of the char­ac­ters. I pen­ciled the open­ing chap­ter, fea­tur­ing the debut of the Sil­ver Age ver­sion of the team: Pro­fes­sor Ex, Dum­b­kophs, Beast­ie Boy, the Anglo, Sno-Cone and Jean­nie Okay (AKA Mar­velous Girl).

I did oth­er projects for Don too, but over time the mar­ket for these books began to dry up, until some projects I’d worked on did­n’t even get enough orders to go to press. At that point, I thought maybe I need­ed some­thing that might pay a bit stead­ier, so I put some feel­ers out and wound up get­ting into ani­ma­tion. Fun­ny to think about it now, in this con­text, but my very first job in ani­ma­tion? Char­ac­ter mod­el cleanup on X‑Men: the Ani­mat­ed Series.

Fast-for­ward to recent­ly: Don got back in touch. He told me he wants to do a reprint of the X‑Cons book, with addi­tion­al mate­r­i­al and in col­or this time. He was curi­ous if I might be game to con­tribute some­thing, per­haps a vari­ant cov­er. It hap­pened to be good tim­ing. We talked about it, and you see the result here. Sil­ly, but fun. I did two ver­sions: reg­u­lar, and extra-crispy!

When Don gets his cam­paign up and run­ning for those inter­est­ed in this book, I’ll update and post a link here.