Faithful Bloglodytes, please forgive this interruption in the blog programming. The conclusion to “Northern Exposure” will appear in the ensuing days. But I wanted to take a brief moment to pay my respects to one of comicbookdom’s greatest artists, Gene Colan, who passed away last night.
Gene may not have laid the foundation for the Marvel Universe, but he was certainly influential in helping make the company the success it is today. His Marvel debut came in 1966 on the Iron Man series in Tales of Suspense #73 (ToS) under the pseudonym Adam Austin (Good friend Mort Todd reminded me that “the Genial One started at Timely-Atlas-Marvel in 1949 on Captain America’s Weird Tales and did loads of horror through the 50s.” The company, however, was not Marvel Comics at that time, and Colan did not gain prominence until his Silver Age return.). This pen name was short-lived and merely to hide his relationship with The House of Ideas from DC with whom he was also working at the time. But Colan’s work was so unique that even Homer Simpson could have figured out Adam Austin’s alias.


Surprisingly, I was initially not a fan. Colan’s style was unlike anything I’d seen as a young’un. My artistic taste buds had yet to mature. But Colan’s rich, detailed pencils; the fluidity of his actions; the atmosphere of every panel; quickly won me over and proved to be instrumental in developing my love of Surrealism and artistic visions far outside the norm, like the stylings of Bill Sienkiewicz, Jon J. Muth and Skottie Young.

Sadly, I never had the pleasure of meeting Colan during my days gigging in the Personal Appearance Department at Marvel. It was only many years later that I met the man at a Big Apple Convention. I was actually working the show so was able to fawn all over the artist without fear of the show’s security escorting me out of the building.
I introduced Wondrous Audrey to Colan when she stopped by to see me, telling her how much I loved his work and showing her examples from the stack for sale on his table, which I forlornly flipped through, knowing I was in no position to buy anything. Not that his stuff was insanely priced—it was mind-staggeringly cheap, considering the source—but I had recently lost my job and could ill-afford to buy coverless copies of the individual comics whence the art came, never mind the art itself.





Colan would’ve liked that.
No comments:
Post a Comment