Saturday, July 23, 2005
Comic Art
As a part of my series to look at the "Honorable Mentions" from my "Expert Witness" post at Evangelical Outpost -- I want to look today at Gil Kane.
Kane has been around forever. Most people these days think of Kane for his work at Marvel, which was very good. I enjoyed it, but because Marvel was so strongly established by Jack Kirby, I think everybody that drew there for a while tried to look just like him. This beautiful Inhumans cover is an example. If I did not know better, I would have thought it was Kirby.
But I remember him from his DC days. Like most people my age, I went looking at comics as a kid because of the George Reeves Superman TV show and the god-awful Adam West Batman.
When I finally found them a whole world opened up to me -- turned out there were a lot more superheroes than just Batman and Superman. The relative complexity of the Marvel characters at that time was appealing, but the DC charcters had such a wonderful look, in some cases better than Marvel -- Gil Kane was among those cases. I will never forget the first time I saw the Atom, and it was drawn my Gil Kane. It was not the best story in the world, but I will always remember the look. The Ray Palmer Atom has always been a fairly weak character, revived recently in the JLA context, but I still love the look, and I don't think it has ever been done better than Gil Kane.
