SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP!

Love Romances #98 (March 1962).

Colletta hands

Oh, Vinnie. Well, you made the deadline, and that was what was most important back in the day.

Today's fans complaining about delays in publication amuses me a bit more than it annoys. Would fans now accept anything that had a rushed, Colletta-style production value to it or do the demands of the market require stylized, photo-realistic, highly-detailed computer-enhanced work with snappy presentation? In times past a good story would often balance out poor art (ie, many comics published in the 1990s). Could the same be said of today, or is it that technological advances and consumer expectations no longer allows creators to give less than an endless series of mind-boggling blockbusters?

Lovers #85 (June 1957).

Flash Fact

Ow. Contemplate the amount of detail erased from that Tales of Asgard panel penciled by Jack Kirby. Well, at least it got published. If anyone else had tried to ink the high amount of news rack-flooding titles of early Marvel's output the company would probably have failed long ago.

While I agree with many that Vince Colletta could be the creative kiss of death for any comic book he worked on, he deserves more industry and fan respect than he usually receives. The man rarely missed a deadline, if ever. If Vinnie had been given an estimated percentage of all the money he routinely saved a publisher by having them avoid the high cost of of idle printing presses due to missing a publishing date he would have been a very wealthy man.

Graduation Present of DEATH!

Vince Colletta, the "Go-To Guy" when you had a printing deadline in the comics biz, did some pencils of his own once upon a time. The line art for this story in My Own Romance #39 (August 1954) isn't bad and is a little more representative of what the man could do as an artist when not applying his economical touch to the pencils of other artists.

But a few of the images are a little confusing and reveal some of the issues many fans have when the subject of Colletta is brought up. I know some people that are still fuming about his inks over Kirby's Tales of Asgard work.

The odd perspective of the splash page has me thinking this love story would end up as a murder mystery. The graduate student in the panel below could just as well have been getting strangled as preparing for a kiss. This could be forgiven once you consider how scripts were done in the old days. A creator sometimes never knew what magazine the story would ultimately be published in and could draw it in such a way as to have multiple endings. There were more than a few romance stories of the era that began as a typical love tale that took an unexpected and sudden turn into the fantastic or mysterious.


Then there is this panel from the exciting conclusion.

Amy looks thrilled, doesn't she? Again, reading the entire story leads me to believe the original script or idea Colletta worked from diverged from the end result by the time the art was completed. But it was just as likely that Coletta was contacted Tuesday night and asked if he could come up with something by Friday morning and worked from the barest outline.

"Vinnie? It's Stan. I need eight pages from you. I don't know...There's a girl, see? She's leaving school and she meets a guy, he might be a bimbo. The girl doesn't know if she should give up her telephone switchboard job for marriage. I'll figure that out later."

"Yeah. I'll have it to you by Thursday."

A lot of people have very little respect for the output of Vince Colletta. But one fact that needs to be taken into consideration in any critque of his work is that without him many of the classic books (and not so classic titles produced mainly to saturate the news stand with their brand) that helped create the modern comic book industry would never have made it to the printers on time or at all.