Saturday, October 08, 2005
Comic Art
Continuing with the Honorable Mentions today we are going to look at Gene Colan. Gene is another of those artists that have done a little of everything. His signature title is probabaly "Tomb of Dracula," but I honestly never liked it enough to want to show you some of it here.Here you see a cover rendering he did of Daredevil for a fan book. Colan's Daredevil is the one I remember as a kid, and I really liked it. It is not quite of the quality to make it definitive, but it's really good - functional without saying "look at me, look at me!" You have to love what he did with the billy club line in this picture, it's a great visual element.
If Colan's signature title is Dracula, you can bet his best work is in the horror/mystic realm. Of course, Doctor Strange is the Marvel mystic title and Colan did his due there. I really liked him on that title.If you know Doc Strange, you'll note that thiis picture is not "normal" -- the good doctor normally has his head exposed, the mask was an affectation that appeared for story reasons during Colan's run, and I have to be honest, I thought it was great.
Superheroes have costumes for a reason, they are readily identifiable and easily drawn. Drawing a distinctive face is very difficult, but not necessarily so for a distinctive mask. If you just look at faces, Reed Richards looks like Tony Stark, who looks like Peter Parker, who looks like Steven Strange. But in costume you have Mr. Fantastic, Iron Man, Spider-Man, and Doctor Strange. Without the mask he always looked like reed/tony/peter/steven in a funky cape. But with the mask he was quite distinctive.
But the place where I decided Colan was really good was the Swamp Thing. And it was the backgrounds more than the characters that really did it for me. If I showed you Colan's Drac stuff you'd see lots of mists and fogs -- that annoyed my on Drac, but it was great on a character called "Swamp Thing."If you've ever been in a swamp you know the air is alwasy hazy and tick. Somehow Colan captured that just perfectly. Swamp Thing is not meant to be seen in stark detail, he just should be shrouded in mist, not entirely visible, with some details indistinct.
Gene Colan was one of the good ones.
