my pal Mick Evans had a copy the new restoration of the old Lee-Kirby Tales of Asgard with him when we had lunch last week. There's a preview of some of the pages at Newsarama, from which I've clipped these panels.


It looks very airless and lightless and unappealing. The very thing that attracted me to this stuff in the first place has been rejected, that is, the riotous colour of those early 1960s Marvels. It was so riotous they could never keep it between the lines, as i'll show below.
Frank Santoro posted an article last week in which Neal Adams talked about how the old comics were limited to effectively 64 colours. Now that there are thousand to choose from, we have to wonder why our present day colourists have trouble getting past GREY (or gray as they write it in the USA). Once or twice when I've drawn these sorts of things I threw in some rough colour guides, taking care to let the colourist know the light sources and times of day, two crucial natural determinants in the appearance of a colour to the human eye. Of course I came to realize that comic book colourists, with one or two exceptions, don't know about and are not interested in such high-flown painterly matters. They have their formulas for modeling shapes and have not much looked up from their computers in the learning of them.
Nevertheless it's good to see some of the Colletta-inked stories in print again. There are even a couple that I don't recall ever seeing before (my Thor collection is impressive but incomplete though I can get an uninterrupted read-through from The Trial of the Gods to Ulik the Troll).

Discussing the work of Vince Colletta is one of those things that guarantees me a lot of visitors, and I bring the subject up yet again, knowing that all these visitors cannot look at the page without glimpsing the ad in the sidebar for my next book. But I do not lie when I say that he was my favourite 'inker' of the 1960s. Last week Sam Henderson posted a short romance story Colletta illustrated in 1960 (more). Since discussions of the artist very rarely get down to specific graphic points, note that I am particularly fond of panel 4 below, in which the bold sweep of the brush lines of the tree trunk is contrasted with the noodling of the flexible pen in the clouds.


I don't know what Sam scanned from, whether original or reprint; it looks fine, too fine to be a 1960 printing. However, in the past I have always been dismayed to see how Colletta's work has suffered in reprints. Following are two pairs of samples. All four of these are from different books; the problem was widespread. The first of each pair is the original printing from the mid-1960s and the second is the reprinting from the 1970s. You have to ignore the differences in the colouring. The older panels both have registration problems, and also there seems to have been a custom of underlaying a deeper yellow in the flesh hues (see the Santoro article linked above which discusses this very point). Colletta's style of inking Jack Kirby's work on Thor favoured a lot of textural fine lines. There is always a feeling of roughness and ruggedness in the inkwork that complements the sense of a pre-technological age. But notice in the reprint images how much of this fine work has disappeared. In the first pair, notice the lines that have disappeared off the yellow of the hair and work around from there. I've zoomed on very small details to make my point, but as I say, on first arriving at the reprinted versions, I'm always filled with a dismay at feeling that overall there is a great deal missing. Even moreso at the thought that these weak photostats(?) are all marvel has kept for the future. In the second pair, notice how the modelling lines on Thor's right arm have filled in, leaving ragged black shapes.





I have wrestled with the very same problems myself, though I am willing to admit that I create many problems with my ultra-fine linework. When Pete Mullins started working with me, one of the first things I observed was that he had worked out an indestructable inking style, quite in contrast to my cobwebbiness .
Here is an example from From Hell. The first version is from the current printing. The second is from the first Tundra/Kitchen volume 1, which went into three printings. The third is an even more degenerate version I just found on the internet. I wrote a 3,500 word account in 2001 of the technical history of From Hell which is quite dense with information that would only be of interest to a limited few people. It's available there via wayback, and should be copied and filed by anyone who can imagine ever wanting such a thing at a remote future date. The example below was particularly annoying to me because the very point of the moment is that a huge solid volume has suddenly placed itself in front of the running Sickert. In the faulty reproductions there is an opening on the side of the vehicle through to a white distant sky, undermining the intended effect.

in the neighbourhood of my computer:


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In response to yesterday's post, John Coulthart linked me to this essay by M Kingsley:

John Berger built upon the work of Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes while describing the collision of advertising and news images in popular media. " The contrast between publicity's interpretation of the world and the world's actual condition is a very stark one, and this sometimes becomes evident in the color magazines which deal with news stories. The shock of such contrasts is considerable: not only because of the coexistence of the two worlds shown, but also because of the cynicism of the culture which shows them one above the other. It can be argued that the juxtaposition of images was not planned. Nevertheless the text, the photographs taken in Pakistan, the photographs taken for the advertisements, the editing of the magazine, the layout of the publicity, the printing of both, the fact that advertiser's pages and news pages cannot be co-ordinated — all these are produced by the same culture."

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wee hayley campbell says the Findus 'Rock'n'rolls ads from 1992 starring Spinal Tap mustn't have appeared in Blighty as she can't find anybody who remembers them. There were at least two, well loved in this house.

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Apatoff on Edgar Degas He has a couple of late landscapes I don't recall seeing before.
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In today's 'Ya made me larf' department, 'And a blind man shall ink them', being a comment on our dear bveloved Vinnie. Posted by the Fake Stan Lee.

i feel a little unclean for bringing up that business about Vince Colletta once more. It's starting to look like I actually give a damn about the whole thing. Sure enough, my visitor statistics shot through the roof for a couple of days. However, I don't think I made myself clear in the end. My position on this is that arguing about Colletta erasing a few of Kirby's pencilled figures is on the same level as arguing about who is stronger, Spiderman or the Hulk. If you care then you are a loony! Don't tell me any more about it! Furthermore, consider how it must look to the outside world, who think it rather eccentric if not foolish for grown people to read comic books, let alone get upset and villify an artist for erasing another artist's pencilled figures FIFTY YEARS AGO. This stuff sounds made up, like a hokey plot for Murder She Wrote or some other old 1980s TV blather for people who stay home in their cosy slippers. Stan Lee could have done a cameo and explained to bright wee Angela Lansbury what an 'inker' is. And the main suspect could have been a big puddin' with no social graces. I expect someone will send me a comment telling me it was already done, and Mark Evanier wrote it. And wee Dirk Deppey remembers it well and put his homework aside to go and watch it and how mortified he was to see his hobby mocked in front of all the adults.
uh where was I ...

Changing the subject, Leif Peng looks at the illustrations of William Smith. I love the big bar scene, of which this is a small detail:

as I was drifting into sleep last night I thought of something urgent that I must say on my blog. Should I get up and scribble it on paper? Nah, I thought to myself, I won't forget something that good.
Until it comes back to me, here are a few links:

Dith Pran, ‘Killing Fields’ Photographer, Dies at 65 - NY Times- March 31, 2008

Dith Pran, a photojournalist for The New York Times whose gruesome ordeal in the killing fields of Cambodia was re-created in a 1984 movie that gave him an eminence he tenaciously used to press for his people’s rights, died in New Brunswick, N.J., on Sunday. He was 65 and lived in Woodbridge, N.J. Mr. Dith saw his country descend into a living hell as he scraped and scrambled to survive the barbarous revolutionary regime of the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979, when as many as two million Cambodians — a third of the population — were killed, experts estimate. Mr. Dith survived through nimbleness, guile and sheer desperation.

Recall the famous image of Marilyn Monroe from the movie The Seven Year Itch where her dress is billowing in the udraught from the grate of the New York subway? Well somebody has made assorted animals from plastic bags that stand in the same updraughts. here is Air ZOO and Air Bear (link thanks to my pal Mia Wolff)

(Anyone bored to tears with arguments about late comic book artist Vince Colletta should read no further) The comments box of my post of 3rd May last year on the subject of comic book artist Vince Colletta is still attracting contributions. I wrote it in the first place in response to the absurd accumulation of abuse toward an artist whose work I enjoyed when I was a lad, and indeed it contributed a great deal to my ideas about pictures and how to make them. It would seem beyond understanding that the little drawings in kids' comic books from fifty years ago could inspire the kind of adult animosity I was reading, much of it by people who don't know what they are talking about (e.g. here). Somebody must feel that his youth has been robbed from him and somebody else must be made to suffer for it. One Dan McFan points the finger at Mark Evanier, and he has started a blog titled Is Mark Evanier mentally ill?

Do you bash Vinnie Colletta every day of the year? If, for instance, you don't talk to a comic person that day, do you bash Vinnie to your butcher or your dry cleaning guy? Do you wake up screaming "I hate Vinnie!" Is your dog even sick of hearing Vinnie's name? Even though he or she has never read a comic book, is your therapist intimately knowledgeable about everything to do with Vinnie? When you can't pinch one off do you cry out "Damn you, Vinnie?" I am convinced that you are mentally ill. If I wasn't laughing so hard right now I'm sure that I would be crying. What did this man do to you to inspire such hatred?I need to start a topic about this, if not here, then somewhere else. People need to know and have the right to weigh in on your fixation and loathing of Vincent Colletta because you are considered some sort of authority. Some comic fans respect you. And you are one of the great perpetrators of the "Vinnie erased the sacred Kirby's pencils-Let's burn him in effigy" club.

Before I leave this interminable disquisiton: Evanier usually makes irrrelevant snide points about Colletta's use of assistants, a custom that became quite prevalent in the '70s, which was a dull period for comic books anyway, with gang inking teams, in which a hack mentality set in across the board (the period in fact in which Evanier learned his craft). Most of the output was so awful it's not worth arguing about (and hey, anybody who thinks comic books are worth arguing about in the first place is in trouble)(I like to think that my own interest in this subject is of a higher order, that is, the fate of art and of artists, their life and posthumous reputation, as implied by my blog title). However, being hired that way was always a good means for aspiring youngsters to get into the business, a kind of unofficial apprenticeship, and also an artist could earn cash in a lean period by helping out a fellow practitioner who had more than he could handle. Furthermore, when we hear that Roz Kirby would help Jack by filling in his blacks and other simple inking procedures we think, aw isn't that cute. It works both ways and can't be used as a criticism in itself. The next major criticism is always aesthetic. The critic doesn't like the inked lines. Simple as that. But bear in mind that most comic book appreciation, like most comic books, is bankrupt of any meaningful aesthetic thought and feeling. I have demonstrated that the lines in question had value for me, discussing their textural qualites of dryness and roughness and muscularity, and the aptness of these to the subject of Norse Myth, and I liked them above all the other inky lines, the shiny and liquid and sleek ones of the time, for the reason of suitability to my preferred subjects. Finally, there are the lines and figures left unseen (removed). I didn't see them when I was ten and it's too late to care now. I was influenced by the ones I did see. If Kirby felt miffed, that's one thing. That you or I should take his side in a tide of anger is absurd. To vent your moral indignation upon a situation that cannot be in any way affected is to leave the path of wisdom. And there are more important things to be angry about. Unless you are a comic book fan, in which case God help ya.

(update. 1.35 am EST. After underestimating the number of comic book fans determined to be upset over this subject at the drop of a hat, I've gone back and closed the comments boxes on all previous posts that mention it)

Crow, crow, cackle, cackle.

The two posts I wrote about old time Marvel "inker" Vince Colletta made me remember what an opinionated bunch of clots you can find arguing about comic books. As obnoxious boys they will argue about who is stronger, Spiderman or the Hulk. When they're a bit older they become half-arsed art critics.

From the words of clots who don’t know a thing about anything and think Colletta ruined Jack Kirby's art by changing it: (from my comment section May 9th.)
“I don't care whether Vince Coletta was a "good" or "bad" person. And up to a few years ago, I didn't know he erased backgrounds. I just know I've hated his work because it looks awful.
Oh, yeah, he does beautiful doe's eyes on girls. Unfortunately, he seems unable to have both eyes on the same level. The faces he inks invariably end up lopsided, the eyes are wide open on one side and half closed on the other.”

From the words of one who inked Jack Kirby’s work for several years and is universally held in high esteem, presumably because he didn't change the master's work when he "inked" it:
"But it's fairly interesting, the story that I'm working on. I'm certainly enjoying it because Jack penciled it in May of 1970. Can you imagine? Thirty-six years ago. And here I am, doing Fantastic Four again on unpublished art. I am rediscovering idiosyncrasies, like him not putting two eyes on the same plane, so I have to correct things like that again."
Opinionated clots everywhere, go screw yourselves!!!
That's from a new interview with the great Joe Sinnott, under the auspices of Tomorrows, from a special publication devoted to the man, on sale May 23. sign me up for one.
(link via Dirk Deppey)
(also, My pal Stuart Immonen picked up the ball and ran with it two days back)

Apologies to those of my readers who have come to enjoy a modicum of gentlemanly behaviour here at campbell.blogspot. but now I have shown my true, shameful, colours.

this was a late update. the proper post follows.

The sorry spectacle of Art screwing itself.

Mark Evanier wrote on his blog yesterday: "I've written a kind of rebuttal to Eddie but it's long and since so many who come to this blog will have zero interest in it, I've posted it over on this page."
Then followed the biggest influx of readers to campbell.blogspot since I installed a statcounter over a month back, so either Evanier has a hell of a lot of readers, or he underestimated their interest in the subject of Vinnie Colletta.

Let's not make a running argument out of the matter, but I do want to address a wider subject and raise pertinent questions (and please consider them rhetorical questions unless you have some profound piece of wisdom that you need to share with me). In my piece I sought to get the thing away from Colletta being 'on trial' and offer a description of my early aesthetic experiences with his work. The problem is: can an aesthetic experience be separated from moral indignation? The conventional philosophical conundrum could be trotted out here: If we look upon a certain work of art by Benvenuto Cellini and find it beautiful, should we then feel guilty when we learn that he mistreated the model, and force ourselves to condemn the work in question? All of Cellini's work? Or is it irrelevant?
Or to put it another way, if it is decided that Colletta behaved badly in his treatment of the work of various artists whom comic-book posterity has come to regard with affection, does this 'judgement' affect even those works where he appears to have behaved well?
While allowing me the right to enjoy whatever I please, Evanier did in a subtle way suggest that Colletta's misdeeds might be backdated (no statute of limitations on this stuff):
"Campbell also displays some samples of alleged Colletta romance art from 1954 to defend the guy. I say "alleged" because a lot of what Colletta signed during this period was ghost-pencilled by others — so much so that I'm not sure which examples, if any, actually reflect Vinnie the Artist, as opposed to Vinnie the Guy Who Had Plenty Of Assistants. But even if Campbell's selections are pure Colletta, what does that prove?"
(Campbell wasn't attempting to 'prove' anything. If you weren't picturing yourself judging in some nutty court of law, such a thought would never have occurred to you. Campbell was describing an aesthetic pleasure.)

The other question is why must we always have to navigate through a comic bookish manichean view of the moral universe? If I do not condemn Colletta then I must be exhonerating him and justifying all his acts.

"A turd is a turd," some rude fellow has just added in comments to my original post. Echoing those very words, one Patrick Dean says on the Comics Journal board about another artist:"Bob Kane was a piece of shit ... I mean, the motherfucker couldn't even paint his own clowns after "retiring" from comics. Fuck that guy."

What?

I consider myself an amateur historian of the arts:
"The historian, whose art is a descriptive one, does not move in this world of moral ideas. His materials and his processes, and all his apparatus exist to enable him to show how a given event came to take place. Who is he to jump out of his true office and merely announce to us that it ought never to have happened at all?" (Herbert Butterfield)

Obviously there are fields in which moral indignation serves a purpose, in political philosohy for instance, where there is a hope to affect the world with a view to improvement, as in the writing of Marx: "Moral indignation against the infamies of capitalism is obvious in all chapters of Capital: it is an essential dimension of what gives such an impressive power to the book."

But what on earth can possibly be achieved by calling Colletta 'a turd' and Kane 'a piece of shit'. What lowbrow arena of artistic notions are we parading in? Who can possibly still have a vested interest? Kirby, Kane, Colletta have all done their life's work and passed on. We have no business taking sides in their affairs. The habit of casting heroes and villains in the story of ART is a habit of low minds, of schoolyard punks (in the original sense of the word) and thickheads.

I guess I don't mean you, Mark. You were in a position to change the course of events, and you brought it about. But to still be harping on about erased figures? It's broken. It can't be fixed. A lot worse crap than that has happened in the last thirty years since then. Everybody we thought was somebody eventually dropped their bundle in some way or other. Adams turned into a fathead (Now you've all got me doing it... but i'm just quoting somebody else), Steranko rested on his laurels... Buscema made himself some rubber stamps... Kirby was never as good again after those Fourth World books... a whole bunch of other guys got complacent... ad infinitum. I still love their best work.

It's the sorry spectacle of art continually screwing itself.

It's so funny it should be a comic book.

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in other news.
two interviews with Campbell about the upcoming Black Diamond Detective Agency:
one at Newsarama.

The other is by Jody MacGregor, a local young writer. I do a bit of talking about my work in progress, The Amazing Remarkable Mr. Leotard, and we were in a pub with my pals White and mr j. Jody described the session on his blog a couple of weeks earlier, where in order to fox my supposed habit of googling my name, he referred to me as Eddie Motherfucking Campbell.

Forgive all the cusswords on this post.

The Villains in my Home Town part 11.

(continuing the round up of my courtroom sketches from ten years back)

This was a 28 year old guy who abducted a 14 year old boy and took him across state lines. He got two years which was the maximum, and the real story seemed to be about the difference in maximum sentences among states and the exact meaning of 'abduction of a child'. This was an early outing, my third. The full figure was small on screen and quite out of focus here. Since all these images are lifted from horizontal video tape frames, the full figures are all thus, though in this instance, the camera panned from the hands up to the face and if I'd thought about in advance I could have shown that in three or four descending panels. But it's sunday. Who would see? Who would applaud? Who would care? "Make room for me, Vinnie!"






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Readers of my Fate of The The Artist will remember the lines I quoted from O. Henry:
"God help me! Next my fangs were buried deep in the fugitive sayings of my little children. I found a ready sale for this kind of humor..."
Relevant to that is this piece in the Guardian of May 5
They write you up, your mum and dad.
"Lucy Etherington looked on aghast as her teenage tantrums were played out in a primetime sitcom..."
Second Thoughts was a British comedy television programme running from 1991 to 1994 and Etheringtons' mother was the writer.
"And as for my parents and what they did to us? Well, I've got kids - I understand how hard it is to be a working mother, and how when you write, real life is sometimes too much of a gift. All life is potential copy, almost irresistibly so. And there is no richer source of inspiration than your own family."
(link via Ben Smith in comments yesterday)

It's F#$@ing Free Comic Book Day.

A nd that bloody publisher of mine is giving away a full color 32 page excerpt from The Black Diamond Detective Agency!
Douglas Wolk explains Free Comic Book day here: "Five years ago, the weekend that the first Spider-Man movie came out, the American comics industry launched an experiment: Free Comic Book Day, in which thousands of comic book specialty stores around the country gave away comics to readers young and old. It worked out well enough that it's become an annual tradition, and this Saturday, May 5, is the sixth Free Comic Book Day. Almost every major comics publisher in the country has at least one free title this year, as well as plenty of smaller publishers; the mainstream and indie presses don't always see eye-to-eye, but they've all found that giving away samples is good for business."

In fact this tradition was introduced around the time I stopped publishing my own books, and it added to my number of reasons for doing so. I was reminded of another reason why I stopped being a self-publisher when Eroom Nala commented on my post of march 1st.
"Typical we're supposed to have everything published in NSW at my library but we've only got Bacchus volumes #1-6 and 9."
As comics started to become more involved in selling to the book market (rather than just the comics 'direct market') this brought with it other administrational complificutions. For instance, the ISBN numbers by which proper books are identified all over the world. Campbell decided he was not going to line up and be given a number by the civil servants of the publishing world. Then I found that amazon.com wouldn't take the books without an ISBN number. Okay, so how do we get them? Well you need to write off to the...bla bla bla and purchase a whole batch of them which you assign to your books as you go along. You register each title with the official governing body, then you need to send a copy of every publication thus registered to the national library. "What, gie away the books fur free?" (don't know why it didn't occur to me to treat it as a sale and bill'em for it). Anne used to handle all that stuff and I'd be throwing a spanner in the works saying, "ah let'em send in a postal order like everybody else!"
Anyway, more often than not I never remembered to do it, or didn't bother, and they were always phoning me to find out why there was a number in the system and no corresponding book on the shelves. Then you need to actually print the number on the books and while you're doing that you might as well put a barcode on there too, so you have to go and find somebody who knows how to make goddamn barcodes, and you're starting to feel like your in the supermarket business instead of the Art game. Now in order to get Amazon.com to take volume 4 I'm going to have to retroactively assign numbers to vols 1-3 (since I'd been a pain in the ass about this for three whole volumes) I suppose I could put the numbers on the book on a sticker. Of course when the time came I thought, what if I don't put the number on it, save the cost of a sticker, and just say that I've put it on.
Then I started losing sleep at night thinking somebody was going to catch me cheating. This was all getting me too far from the simple reasons why I wanted to draw my work and get it out there.

Between all that and Staros giving away free copies to reviewers, I decided I'd had enough of this bullshit. So I gave up publishing my own books.

First person to put their hand up in comments can have the little sketch shown above in the mail. For free.
"So help ma boab. Noo their givin' away ma originals fur nothin. Fuk this."
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ad break!
I've had a tornado of traffic over the last 24 hours thanks to Dan Shahin linking to my piece on Vinnie Colletta of two days back on the boingboing site where some clot described Vinnie's work in disparaging terms. So with a view to fostering a Vinnie Colletta appreciation society, let me return the favour by drawing your attention to Dan's online graphic novel store at www.comicbookshelf.com. If you need a copy of one of my books or anybody else's, you can have a look there.
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Anyway, I went along to Free Comic Book Day at the major store in our town here, as we have ours earlier than everybody else, except the New Zealanders, with a view to chewing the fat with local comics readers about my new book, only to find that the store had not heard of the Black Diamond freebie and didn't order any in. Once again the world of comics has reduced me to a disappointed and despondent state. I want to propose a new catch phrase, as I am sure you are aware of our liking for catch phrases here at campbell blogspot, and will recall such gems as "It's not a graphic novel. Percy," among many others.
When the world of comics has disappointed you, and you just don't care any more and can't be bothered to make the effort, you must say: "Make room for me, Vinnie!"
And speaking of catch-phrases, I gotta laff! While I was checking my statcounter I noticed somebody arrived at this blog with the following Google searchwords:
Frank Miller Roning.

whoever you are, "thanks for roning."

Vincent Colletta, my favourite 1960s "Inker"

T he word "inker" is another of those that are spelled with quote marks here at campbell blogspot.
Heidi Macdonald wrote on 30 april:
"Vinnie Colletta is a legendary name in comic book circles — legendary because he could be one of the worst inkers in the biz, but kept getting work because he was fast and reliable and had some powerful friends..."
She then links to a piece from the previous day at the blog 20th Century Danny Boy:
"Vinnie Colletta. Much has been written about Vinnie in the years since his passing (1991), not all of it is true or accurate. Speak to a professional artist and more often than not they'll have an opinion on Vinnie. "He was a no talent, no good hack," they say, "a bum that ruined Jack Kirby's artwork by haphazard inking and shortcuts." In some regards they're right, he was a bit of a hack. He also indeed did take a lot of shortcuts in his work, in some cases he erased the pencils so he'd not have to ink them. Jack Kirby would draw detailed backgrounds only to see them simplified by Colletta. Yet there were other sides to Vinnie.
When I first spoke to Don Perlin he chastised me for chuckling at the mention of Vinnie's name and told me that, "Vinnie was a very nice guy and Vinnie could do great work."

It's a shame that even the wikipedia entry on Colletta is full of the bad stuff. Something I observed while working on The Fate of the Artist was the sad fact that an artist's posthumous encyclopedia entry will tend to be discolored by that bad thing he perpetrated. It usually takes the form of a sentence about the circumstances of his death, which in a five sentence paragraph is surely out of proportion to the whole. I have a short papragraph on the 18th century composer Anton Filtz which manages to mention that he had a predilection for eating spiders, a five paragraph summary of the life of Louis Guillemain that spends one whole paragraph on the sorry mess of his self mutilation, death and hasty burial (I've mentioned these blokes elsewhere, and I do so again because I'm trying to relate this to a bigger picture)
On! Two years back I picked up a coverless copy of a 1954 (that tiny corner of cover you can see in the first image actually contains the part of the indicia that shows the year. what luck!) Atlas romance comic book. It has two stories illustrated by Colletta; he drew mainly romance stories after entering the field the previous year. Look at the big splash panel. That ear looks incorrect, but it's the only one in the story that does so, so let's overlook that (in much the same way that you forgave a clumsy ear of mine a couple of weeks back). What strikes us about this picture is the use of the chinagraph pencil to soften and model forms, most successfully on the pretty girl's cheek. The only other place I've seen that effect in a vintage comic was in Kubert's Firehair in the late '60s (but I'm no completist). The second image is the last page from the same story. There's one place in an earlier page where the artist doesn't seem to have entirely figured out a photo he's using for reference, but on this last page we can see that he does have an organisational skill. He makes an attractive arrangement out of a relatively static scene, focussing on body language and expression, with a restrained use of spotted blacks and once again various ways of softening the hard medium of black line art.
Colletta never generates the intensity that Alex Toth could with the same kind of material, but I always enjoy picking up these old things when I find them, and they never cost very much.

Colletta was an anomaly in 1960s New York comic books. Romance was fast going out of fashion which is probably why he found himself converted from illustrator to a full time "Inker" in the mode of the times, which became rapidly more assembly-line driven (and for all we know, his sense of self-worth may have taken a blow here). As such he in time became a standby workhorse who could be depended upon to get a job finished in a very short time. But then again his finishing style was distant from the superhero house styles at both DC (Murphy/Giella) and Marvel (Sinnott/Giacoia). But he was fast and dependable. Ah Fate! An artist's strength becomes his undoing. As always, the biggest mistake one can make is in not seeing far enough ahead and reading all the signs, but let's not dwell on that and attend to the mid-'60s.
As it happened he landed in the job that was perfect for his abilities. THOR is my enduring favourite comic book of the period and I have kept or at least reconstituted a good long run of the title from the five years that Colletta inked over Jack Kirby. Here is an enlarged view of the thumb of Hercules. Look at the inking on this, the rugged hatching with which Colletta models the arm.
Far from the softening process that we saw above, Colletta augmented the inherent strength of the design by contrasts of texture, of flesh and hair, wood and fur and steel, looking forward to a different kind of heroic epic that would become popular later. I'm thinking of the Lord of the Rings. A return to that kind of old-worldly adventure was unglimpsed at this stage in our progress, when we still thought we were all going for a trip to the moon, and the ideal was all shiny and perfect and automated. THOR had started as a regular superhero comic and was adventurously trying to evolve into something much bigger. There was so much potential in the very look of the art. And Colletta was certainly not skimping on his coverage of Kirby's detail here in this magnificent battle scene from the May 1966 #128.
My personal theory about the decline of Colletta's reputation, apart from the annoyingly futile habit of afficionados to take sides in arguments between parties long deceased, is that none of the reprints of the work have ever been adequate (Though to be fair I haven't looked at the more recent versons, the Marvel Masterworks or Essentials or whatever). In the years when I attempted to 'reconstitute' my collection of the Lee-Kirby-Colletta THOR, I noticed how poor the later reprintings of the stories always were. Sinnott and Giacoia and all the others never suffered in the same way; perhaps they knew how to make their lines indestructable. All Colletta's charming qualities, the softening lines and subtle textures tended to go blank. The finest lines disappear, unless they're close to other fine lines in which case they congeal into one thick line. Second generation versions of those great favourite books of mine never satisfied my longing to re-obtain the experience of my first readings. A fair assessment of Colletta can only be made on those first printings. And stick to the best years (Hell, I can't even make myself read Kirby after halfway through the New Gods). With age and experience we can come to understand how an artist who's been around this business a long time would lose interest in trying to do subtle and attractive things, and it's perhaps easier to undestand how a young and enthusiastic editor would not want that artist hanging around to cast a gloomy shadow over the proceedings.
Here endeth the art lesson. Please don't maul the model on the way out.

(footnote to the above. Marvel are still not very good at reproducing line art, though digital scanning at least means they can keep it without the further deterioration that used to occur. I have my own experiences in this regard. As a rule I would say that if you see fine looking detail in a Marvel book these days the artist probably scanned it himself rather than leave it to chance in the production dept. It's a bit sad really when you think how much work and expense goes into the colouring that goes on top of the linework. Anyway, but that's another essay.)

(If you don't know already, all the above images can be clicked to enlarge)
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in other news:
from drjon
The Gull catchers go around the dance floor one more time.: Jack the Ripper ID'd by Historian

from Hayley Campbell:
Police call locksmith to break into jail-- Reuters--Wed May 2.
"Police in Germany had to call in a locksmith to break into jail when the lock on a cell broke, trapping a prisoner inside, authorities said Wednesday."