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Colorists
#921872 02/10/17 03:03 AM
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A dicsussion in the Thor thread sent me down a rabbit hole last night, and I've been reading obsessively about colorists and color.

Matt Wilson, the Thor colorist, has done a lot of work that I've been reading, not even realizing it was him. Thor, Paper Girls, The Wicked + The Divine, and the Azzarello Wonder Woman. Whatever complicated feelings I have about the writing in that series, the art (including the coloring) was incredible every time. He's also done a lot of other high profile things I didn't read, but that are part of a very impressive resume.

That got me thinking about how unappreciated colorists are. I'm sure I'm far from the only reader who doesn't know who colors the books I read, or even notice when one person colors a lot of them. This reminded me of the only other colorist I've ever followed. Laura Martin nee Dupuy. She colored the incredible Warren Ellis runs on Planetary and Authority, and many other wonderful projects. I lost track of her, and was embarrassed just now to realize she is currently on Black Panther, one of my favorite current Marvel books, and the odd-numbered issues of Greg Rucka's current Wonder Woman series.

Then when I got home from work, I went through all of my current series to look more closely at the colors and see who stood out. I didn't include artists who do their own colors, since that's a different kind of beast:

Frank Martin (East of West) An extremely serious story with art that sometimes veers into the cartoony, he does a great job of filling the page with vibrant colors that can play to the more cartoonish characters, while somehow keeping it feeling very grounded. What especially stood out to me was that there are several characters who are entirely or almost entirely white or black with white overtones. He does an incredible job of building a panel with well balanced color around characters who are essentially colorless.

Ian Herring (Ms Marvel) Someone with more of an art background could tell you why Mr. Herring's work is so distinctive. I can't explain it, but he doesn't look like anything out there. I think he's a HUGE and underappreciated part of what makes this juggernaut title what it is.

Betsy Gonia (the first colorist on Postal) Nice but not flashy colors, but she did a great job of using contrast to highlight something on the page. There might be a page of darker color with a splash of red blood jumping out. A new colorist came on a few issues ago, and he's doing a perfectly good job, but I haven't seen as many little effective touches.

Kelly Fitzpatrick (Shade the Changing Girl) S/he deserves a medal just for being able to color a book like this at all. He's a psychedelic roller coaster of a book, with very normal sequences, bizarre drug trip style surreality, and places where the surreal and psychedelic slowly impose themselves on reality, all with art that borrows from the crazy work of Steve Ditko and Chris Bachalo. Then, the colorist adds to the insanity by putting cool texture patterns in the backgrounds or on objects to make it all a little bit weirder.

I just thought I'd see how many other people have given much thought to coloring or colorists.

Re: Colorists
Brain-Fall-Out Boy #921876 02/10/17 03:15 AM
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BF, I've given a ton of thought to coloring and colorists over the course of my lifetime, so thank you for starting this thread.

I do have to run and take care of some errands shortly, but to give you the gist of my views on comic-book coloring, my tastes are far more old-school than yours, but Laura Martin is definitely where the twain meets, so to speak.

Off the top of my head, the first colorist I noted as having a distinct style was the great Glynis Oliver, of Claremont/Byrne early 80s Uncanny X-Men fame, when I bought my very first superhero trade paperback in the early 90s, the first edition of the Dark Phoenix Saga.

And those who stood out to me in "Real Time" during the 90s included Ms. Oliver herself (Hulk, Excalibur, and more), Carla Feeny (Spectre), Tom Palmer (Avengers), John Kalisz (also Avengers, and, in the 2000s, JSA), Joe Rosas (X-Men, X-Force), among others whom I can't recall ATM.

I will return to elaborate sometime this afternoon.

Thanks again, BF.


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Re: Colorists
Brain-Fall-Out Boy #921881 02/10/17 04:29 AM
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My best friend is a colorist, Nei Ruffino. She's worked on Green Lantern, Birds of Prey, a number of Blackest Night tie-ins, and a lot of Zenescope's titles.

Re: Colorists
Brain-Fall-Out Boy #921907 02/10/17 01:20 PM
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Something else else else I noticed while going through my current titles. There are several books that I always enjoy once I read them, but sometimes it takes me a week or two to force myself to start for some reason. In almost all of those cases, those wound up being books drenched in drab greens, browns, and grays, or muddy hues of other colors. They aren't badly colored, they actually fit the tone of these books quite well. I'm not sure if it's the coloring that makes it sometimes a chore to start, or if it's simply the fact that they are the kinds of books that warrant those colors that requires more effort on my behalf, but I thought it was interesting.

Re: Colorists
Brain-Fall-Out Boy #921911 02/10/17 03:08 PM
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Even though I grew up on 70s and early 80s comics, I never really gave color much thought. I didn't really start to notice it until painted and digital coloring came onto the scene, which probably explains my "new-fangled" tastes.

Re: Colorists
Sarcasm Kid #921918 02/11/17 06:39 AM
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Originally Posted by Sarcasm Kid
My best friend is a colorist, Nei Ruffino. She's worked on Green Lantern, Birds of Prey, a number of Blackest Night tie-ins, and a lot of Zenescope's titles.


I hope to meet her someday. The way you've described her in the past, she sounds like an awesome person.


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Re: Colorists
Brain-Fall-Out Boy #921919 02/11/17 06:45 AM
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Originally Posted by Brain-Fall-Out-Boy
Something else else else I noticed while going through my current titles. There are several books that I always enjoy once I read them, but sometimes it takes me a week or two to force myself to start for some reason. In almost all of those cases, those wound up being books drenched in drab greens, browns, and grays, or muddy hues of other colors. They aren't badly colored, they actually fit the tone of these books quite well. I'm not sure if it's the coloring that makes it sometimes a chore to start, or if it's simply the fact that they are the kinds of books that warrant those colors that requires more effort on my behalf, but I thought it was interesting.


I know exactly what you're talking about. One recent re-coloring job on a mid-90s Vertigo miniseries that I was very impressed with was the belated release of the "Flex Mentallo" hardcover. I had missed it the first time around, so I only have the odd scan here and there on the internet to compare the original coloring with the new, but I think the story is greatly enhanced with the way that the colors shift from drab (for the "real world" scenes) to popping-bright (for the superhero scenes, and a few others, like when the drug addict in the subway station restroom "goes cosmic.")


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Re: Colorists
Brain-Fall-Out Boy #921920 02/11/17 06:52 AM
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Originally Posted by Brain-Fall-Out Boy
Even though I grew up on 70s and early 80s comics, I never really gave color much thought. I didn't really start to notice it until painted and digital coloring came onto the scene, which probably explains my "new-fangled" tastes.


Really? Not even "Grande Dame Glynis?" She was as much a part of what made the Claremont/Byrne Uncanny X-Men a cut above the rest as Tom Orzechowski's lettering and Terry Austin's inks.

For that matter, I think the same could be said of Tatjana Wood (Alan Moore's "Saga of the Swamp Thing"), and Adrienne Roy ("New Teen Titans", "Batman & the Outsiders.")

And, while I'm thinking about it, other notable old-school colorists I forgot the first time around:

- Lovern Kindzierski (sp?), founder of Digital Chameleon

- Stan Goldberg, Marvel's premiere Silver Age colorist, whom Teeds has been requesting more detailed posts about for a long time. Well, Teeds, thanks to BF, your wishes are about to come true. smile


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Re: Colorists
Brain-Fall-Out Boy #921922 02/11/17 07:53 AM
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So...Stan Goldberg.

To me, what sums up the late, great SG, was the way that, in the first few years of Marvel As We Know It (roughly 1962-1966), he could make such challenging artistic styles as Steve Ditko's hallucinatory oddness and Jack Kirby's monolithic shows of force not only more accessible, but also providing a metaphorical sweet candy coating which helped such visionary weirdness go down easier with readers accustomed to the pristine and hyper-plausible DC House Style of that time. This Ditko Spider-Man cover is, to me, among the quintessence of early-mid 60s Marvel. Goldberg's gradations (far more subtle than they might appear, especially considering that Marvel could not, at that time, afford the same quality production and printing as DC) produce not only a great feeling of aesthetic harmony, but also highlight the contrasts between grim, grey New York City in the background and the costumed cuckoos battling each other in the foreground.

click to enlarge

IMHO, Kirby's art during these years particularly benefitted from Goldberg, as roughly 80% of all the artwork published in Marvel's handful of titles was either fully penciled or laid-out by Kirby. And with a workload like that, even an artist as industrious as Kirby was bound to produce results which only hinted at how good he could be.

Once the success of Marvel allowed Stan Lee to hire (or, in many cases, re-hire) veteran artists such as John Romita Sr and John Buscema (the latter a close personal friend of Goldberg's) and allow Kirby to stop spreading himself so thin, Kirby focused mainly on Thor and Fantastic Four. And if, as noted over the last year or two in Marvel-related discussions in this forum, the FF's first confrontation with Galactus does not hold up as well as other Silver Age Marvel classics, at least this cover (pencils by Kirby, inks by the always-smooth Joe Sinnott), remains as iconic as it appeared more than 50 years ago:

click to enlarge

Finally, these last two covers (at least for the moment) highlight Goldberg's talent for making accidental masterpieces out of a necessity to expedite his own workload. The heavy use of what would later come to be disdainfully termed "block coloring" after it was practiced in the 70s and 80s by far less talented colorists than SG could produce amazing results when applied with control and conscience to bold, forceful imagery.

(The first cover below is penciled by Kirby and inked by Romita; the second cover is penciled by John Buscema and inked by Joe Sinnott.)

click to enlarge

click to enlarge

SG's Wikipedia entry:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stan_Goldberg

Interview with SG:

http://www.adelaidecomicsandbooks.com/goldberg.html


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Re: Colorists
Brain-Fall-Out Boy #921941 02/11/17 02:37 PM
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Agreed on Flex Mentallo. In that case, unlike the books I was talking about, it didn't even fit the title. Flex Mentallo needs to be brightly colored like the old comics it's meant to reflect.

I think the problem is that I was just too young to appreciate the contribution color made when those books were coming out. Of the colorists you mention, the books colored by Adrienne Roy stand out in my head particularly well, and I can appreciate now how much her sharp colors contributed, but back then I wasn't even paying attention to who the writer and penciller were, let alone the more subtle contributors.

The first issue of X-Men I read was actually John Byrne's last issue. I'm not sure why since I had been reading superhero comics about 3 years by that point, but I have no memories of even knowing the X-Men existed before that issue. I didn't start reading X-Men regularly until a few months later with #147. (Rogue Storm!) I eventually got to read the older stuff through whatever that reprint series was called, but the Claremont/Byrne run just has a secondary place in my head to other stuff of that era.

Now the Superman titles of the late 70s I have huge memories of, Superman Family in particular. I should go back and look at those, although I'm not sure how much the coloring contributed to that.

I think for whatever reason I just have trouble seeing past the technical limitations of the coloring process in older comics. I realize it's totally unfair, since for whatever reason I can read and appreciate the older pencil and ink work, despite the fact that printing processes and paper quality had just as much impact on them as on colors, but there it is.

I've gone down the rabbit hole of reading up on color theory and colorist interviews, not to mention buying some comics-themed adult coloring books to play around with what I'm reading about myself, so maybe that will change.

An interview I read with Matt Wilson talked about how he will sometimes use color choices to help guide the eye through the correct panel sequence on a page, a great example of something that would never have occurred to me two days ago would be a contribution a colorist could make.

I'm really glad that I made that one random comment on the Thor thread, and that you responded. A genuine education for me!

Re: Colorists
Brain-Fall-Out Boy #921943 02/11/17 04:29 PM
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Didn't the recoloring of Flex Mentallo accidentally white wash some characters who were originally Black and dark skinned?

Re: Colorists
Brain-Fall-Out Boy #921945 02/11/17 04:47 PM
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I looked it up, and my memory was backwards. The ORIGINAL was the bright, four-color inspired work, and the reprint was the one with darker, subdued hues. The article I read didn't mention whitewashing (and it was negative on the new colors), but that doesn't mean it didn't happen.

https://www.bleedingcool.com/2012/04/06/the-curious-recolouring-of-flex-mentallo/

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Re: Colorists
Brain-Fall-Out Boy #921956 02/12/17 12:39 AM
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Originally Posted by Brain-Fall-Out Boy
Even though I grew up on 70s and early 80s comics, I never really gave color much thought. I didn't really start to notice it until painted and digital coloring came onto the scene, which probably explains my "new-fangled" tastes.


A quick 2 cents... I remember really liking Daniel Vozzo's colouring on Morison's Doom Patrol. I think he had moved to some digital work, and it really made an impact in the book.

The Baxter paper stock really seemed to hold colour well. As colour options were expanding, it was good to have a format that would show them well. They still look great on every reread.


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Re: Colorists
Brain-Fall-Out Boy #921969 02/12/17 10:22 AM
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Digital Chameleon was the name of the... whatever it was that colored DC comics in the 90s right?

Re: Colorists
Brain-Fall-Out Boy #921978 02/12/17 12:24 PM
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Yep. And among their alumni is Legion Worlder Mechana (Ronda Pattison), herself.

Sadly, Digital Chameleon closed up shop in 2003.

Kindzierski's solo coloring credits include one of my favorite DC runs of all time, the Grant/Kitson/Giffen issues of L.E.G.I.O.N.


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Re: Colorists
Brain-Fall-Out Boy #921981 02/12/17 01:56 PM
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Oh so Digital Chameleon was a group?

Re: Colorists
Brain-Fall-Out Boy #921985 02/12/17 03:23 PM
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I remember Morrison's Doom Patrol very fondly. I don't remember a whole lot about the coloring, except the occasional tornado of colors during the more psychedelic moments, and the final issue being colored to create a drab, sepia-like feel.

I recall Shade the Changing Man as a title that did a particularly good job of taking advantage of the imrpoving technology/paper stock of the era to do some really impressive things.

Man, that Digital Chameleon reference takes me back. I was a regular in the rec.arts.comics fora in the heydey, and there was a HUGE kerfuffle when the people organizing the Squiddie awards decided studios were ineligible for awards, only work identified to a specific person could win. I remember being very fervently against that rule.

Grant/Kitson/Giffen L.E.G.I.O.N. - yes, absolutely! A great book, and great coloring. Books with lots of aliens or psychedelic effects must be great fun for colorists.

Which reminds me of something else I was thinking about the Wolfman/Perez era Titans, especially the original lineup. I imagine they wre a colorist's dream lineup. Most of them had a dominant costume color, all different: White/silver (Cyborg), Blue/Black (Raven), Red (Wonder Girl), Yellow (Kid Flash). Plus the skin of Starfire and Changeling brought lots of Orange and Green into play. Lots of color balance.

I remember a later issue of Wolfman's run with a cover showing Wonder Girl, Robin, Flash (non-kid), Speedy, Aqualad, and Hawk. That wall of red was probably less fun to work with.

Re: Colorists
Brain-Fall-Out Boy #921987 02/12/17 04:05 PM
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The world really is full of wonders! I never realized that primary colors are a function of biology, not physics. They don't reflect any property of light or optics, they are simply the wavelengths the three kinds of cones in our eyes each detect best. And the secondary colors are secondary because the brain has to triangulate them according to how much they trigger the various cones in the eye.

Did I learn that in school and forget, or is this amazing factoid something I'm just learning now?

Re: Colorists
Brain-Fall-Out Boy #921988 02/13/17 01:18 AM
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Sarky, it was indeed a group, formed in 1991 in Canada (Winnipeg, Manitoba, to be exact), initially with Chris Chuckry as President, and the aforementioned Lovern K as Vice-President-slash-Creative-Director.

BF, I'm always delighted to find out that someone else is a fan of those first 5 years or so of L.E.G.I.O.N. I consider the book's summit of quality to be bookended by issue 23 (the origin of the Durlan) on one side, and issue 27 (the epilogue to the L.E.G.I.O.N. vs Khundia battle) on the other side, and with my gateway issue, Annual #2 (the Armageddon 2001 tie-in, penciled by a very young Mike McKone), in between. But, needless to say, I think there's lots of good stories before and after that.


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Re: Colorists
Brain-Fall-Out Boy #922013 02/13/17 04:03 PM
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I started reading the book when Lar Gand was a member for what, three issues? I particularly love the first 2 1/2 years or so, when it felt like anything could happen. Then it settled down and got very predictable for a long stretch. The R.E.C.R.U.I.T.S. felt like it was adding a group of second-tier characters so they could still have things happen without upsetting the status quo for the main characters.

Despite some missteps, I quite enjoyed the Peyer run, as it really brought back the unpredictability and roller coaster ride of the early issues.

Re: Colorists
Brain-Fall-Out Boy #922018 02/14/17 02:06 AM
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BF, I had typed up a really nice reply and added three links to L.E.G.I.O.N. related threads, and...it got "eaten up" without being posted. Sorry. frown

I'll try to reconstruct it later, but for now, here's the most pertinent link. Enjoy:

http://www.legionworld.net/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=624388&page=1


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Re: Colorists
Brain-Fall-Out Boy #922031 02/14/17 10:27 AM
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There was a really spiffy L.E.G.I.O.N. reread thread by Fickles. That's well worth a link...

Those books were in colour... keeps within thread boundaries... um... like a lot of books... c'mon stick with it... ah...except ones that are black and white... keep going.. which might be discussed in another thread... although black... don't forget white... and white...are colours too! >whew!< averted thread derail disaster!


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Re: Colorists
thoth lad #922282 02/20/17 09:03 AM
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Originally Posted by thoth lad
There was a really spiffy L.E.G.I.O.N. reread thread by Fickles. That's well worth a link...


And...I finally got around to it:

https://www.legionworld.net/forums/u...;Main=15179&Number=625150#Post625150

Thanks for the kind words, Thoth.


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Re: Colorists
Fanfic Lady #922378 02/22/17 06:02 AM
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This is a really fantastic topic and I can’t wait to read through it all (other than just the initial posts). A longtime member of this group is Ronda Pattison, one of the best colorists in the business, and is among other things the hand-picked colorist by Sam Keith to do all his work. Ronda doesn’t post as much as she used to—she’s busy getting Eisner nominations and stuff—but she always provided tremendous insight into the life of a colorist in the comic book world.

Colorists today are more important than ever. They’ve also assumed the traditional duties of inkers in a lot of ways, providing duties that are more ‘finished art’ than just color. At some point in the last 10 years, colorists in general made some tremendous advances, and it shows in the various series. Whether the very moody and atmospheric colors of Betty Breitweiser (a personal favorite of mine, who does most of Brubaker and Phillips’ work) or the multi-layered style of Jordie Bellaire (on just about everything these days) or the aforementioned Frank Martin, whose vibrant colors made Thor #13-14 (among other things) really pop, colorists today lend their own style to series that can really change the look and feel of it, much like the best inkers of the past decades used to do.

BFOB, I like the list of colorists you mention right off the bat! Most of them are names that have not become known to me, so I’ll keep an eye out for them going forward. There are too many to list that I know of, but I’ll add that I always like Laura Martin assisting Mike, I’ve kept an eye on Nei Ruffino since Sarky mentioned her years ago, Glynis Oliver (formerly Wein) is a name I recognized again and again, and lastly, Lynn Varley’s surgical colors always made the works of Frank Miller, Trevor Von Eden and others pop. Naturally, I could go on and on, and intend to over time in this thread.

Originally Posted by Brain-Fall-Out Boy
Something else else else I noticed while going through my current titles. There are several books that I always enjoy once I read them, but sometimes it takes me a week or two to force myself to start for some reason. In almost all of those cases, those wound up being books drenched in drab greens, browns, and grays, or muddy hues of other colors. They aren't badly colored, they actually fit the tone of these books quite well. I'm not sure if it's the coloring that makes it sometimes a chore to start, or if it's simply the fact that they are the kinds of books that warrant those colors that requires more effort on my behalf, but I thought it was interesting.


I feel this greatly myself and its hurt a lot of the series that I’d like to try, especially independents. Lazarus, for example, feels so drab.

Re: Colorists
Brain-Fall-Out Boy #922379 02/22/17 06:02 AM
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Originally Posted by Fanfic Lady
So...Stan Goldberg.

To me, what sums up the late, great SG, was the way that, in the first few years of Marvel As We Know It (roughly 1962-1966), he could make such challenging artistic styles as Steve Ditko's hallucinatory oddness and Jack Kirby's monolithic shows of force not only more accessible, but also providing a metaphorical sweet candy coating which helped such visionary weirdness go down easier with readers accustomed to the pristine and hyper-plausible DC House Style of that time. This Ditko Spider-Man cover is, to me, among the quintessence of early-mid 60s Marvel. Goldberg's gradations (far more subtle than they might appear, especially considering that Marvel could not, at that time, afford the same quality production and printing as DC) produce not only a great feeling of aesthetic harmony, but also highlight the contrasts between grim, grey New York City in the background and the costumed cuckoos battling each other in the foreground.

click to enlarge

IMHO, Kirby's art during these years particularly benefitted from Goldberg, as roughly 80% of all the artwork published in Marvel's handful of titles was either fully penciled or laid-out by Kirby. And with a workload like that, even an artist as industrious as Kirby was bound to produce results which only hinted at how good he could be.

Once the success of Marvel allowed Stan Lee to hire (or, in many cases, re-hire) veteran artists such as John Romita Sr and John Buscema (the latter a close personal friend of Goldberg's) and allow Kirby to stop spreading himself so thin, Kirby focused mainly on Thor and Fantastic Four. And if, as noted over the last year or two in Marvel-related discussions in this forum, the FF's first confrontation with Galactus does not hold up as well as other Silver Age Marvel classics, at least this cover (pencils by Kirby, inks by the always-smooth Joe Sinnott), remains as iconic as it appeared more than 50 years ago:

click to enlarge

Finally, these last two covers (at least for the moment) highlight Goldberg's talent for making accidental masterpieces out of a necessity to expedite his own workload. The heavy use of what would later come to be disdainfully termed "block coloring" after it was practiced in the 70s and 80s by far less talented colorists than SG could produce amazing results when applied with control and conscience to bold, forceful imagery.

(The first cover below is penciled by Kirby and inked by Romita; the second cover is penciled by John Buscema and inked by Joe Sinnott.)

click to enlarge

click to enlarge

SG's Wikipedia entry:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stan_Goldberg

Interview with SG:

http://www.adelaidecomicsandbooks.com/goldberg.html


I was going to pontificate a lengthy post on Stan Goldbert but found myself simply repeating a lot of what you’ve already said, Fanfie. Stan was basically the secret, underappreciated weapon of the Marvel Age of Comics, and helped make Marvel the powerhouse that it was. Your comments on his contributations to Ditko and Kirby’s work is spot on. Kirby even said so himself numerous times in later interviews in the 80’s and 90’s, and had all the praise in the world for Stan (add in inks by Chic Stone or Joe Sinnott and it just doesn’t pop—it explodes!).

That ASM #23 is an issue my father and I own in mint condition. It is spectacular to look at!


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