Happy Birthday to Gene Colan, Master of Shadow

In recognition of Gene Colan's 80th Birthday, I'm presenting one of the reasons why he is my favorite comic book artist.

Daredevil #56 (Sept 1969)

He drew an invisible horse with the anatomy clearly defined by the use of light and shadow. Death's-Head was clearly a Scooby-Doo villain in that it was all special effects. He knew it, his victims knew it and Daredevil knew it. Gene Colan left no doubt that the bad guy of this story was not a supernatural creature but just an murderous bastard with a few clever tricks. Exactly the kind of creep that Daredevil should always fight. In drawing the Hollow Horse, lesser artists would have outlined the mount using dotted lines or drawn the rider as if it was riding only a skeleton, which for the story would have been artistically sloppy.

Not only did Gene Colan break from the Marvel style of emulating Kirby, he was one of the first to use rough pencils in mainstream comics as a way of story-telling, most notably in the Ragamuffins series for Eclipse comics.

From Eclipse, The Magazine #3 (Nov 1981)

All you comic noobs, treat yourself and read some Daredevil, Tomb of Dracula and Nathaniel Dusk. Let "Dr. Colan" heal the scars cut deep into a brain viciously wounded by the art-thugs of Liefeld, Ramos, Bachalo and pretty much anyone else who started working in comics in the 90's.

Other Colan entries *

Gene Colan and Motion

Groin Injury Saturday: Dracula

* Heh-heh

My two cents on Gene Colan

As many have reported, comics veteran and my personal fave comic artist Gene Colan is ill and is having difficulty meeting the expenses of health care. There are available auctions of his work and some creators have pledged that a portion or all of profits from their material will go to Mr. Colan.

While buying some more Colan goodies is fine, I prefer the direct donation approach the TCJ recommended. You can go to Paypal and make a direct donation to Gene at genecolan@optonline.net. Now, I am by no means rolling in cash myself but I can spare a few bucks out of my Economic Stimulus check for the Colans. While the Government would probably prefer I go buy a television with it I'm using it to reduce my bills a bit and give myself a break, just like much of the populace of America will likewise be doing. Instead of buying that new memory card for the camera, patio furniture or that Starbucks travel mug you had your eye on skip a few coffees in the morning and make a donation to Gene, who gave us all so much over so many years. You'll never miss it and you'll do a good thing.

Get well soon, Gene!

The page above from Tomb of Dracula #50 is actually one of the few pieces of original art I own I have not divested myself of. When I saw it way back in the 1980s at the San Diego Comic Con I just had to have it. No, it isn't for sale and it never will be. When I do part with it I will probably donate it a museum or library or something.

Gene Colan

Heard today of the passing of who is without a doubt my favorite comic book artist ever, Gene Colan at the age of 84.

At the right is a page from Tomb of Dracula #50 featuring the unlikely battle between the Lord of Vampires and the Silver Surfer. This page from ToD was the first original art I ever owned. When I saw it on a table at the San Diego Comic Con years ago I knew I had to have it. Gene Colan in that one page combined what I enjoyed most about horror and science fiction with effortless wild talent.

Thanks, Gene.

Worth repeating: Gene Colan and motion

I've said it before...

I think one of the few artists who can effectively convey a sense of motion in their art is Jack Kirby and my own personal comic-deity, Gene Colan. As Erik Larsen observes in a recent Comic Book Resources column One Fan's Opinion:

One of the many things we don't have in comics is motion. Motion, sound, smell, taste-- most of the big ones-- we don't do. In movies, characters move. In comics, we can only approximate it, at best. Gene comes about as close as we're likely to get. Gene's characters are often a blur of motion. I've heard he's a big movie buff and it shows on every page. While most of us struggle to make a guy in a suit look like anything other than a mannequin standing in a store window, Gene pulls it off with ease. His characters live and breathe.

When was the last time you saw a character get hit and the artist effectively included the illusion of impact? Probably almost never, I bet. Most artists, even the technically proficient ones, may as well be posing action figures and using them as art references. Using Phototshop to blur a scene is a trick, and while pretty and useful, is not art. Colan can give still images inertia and convey realistic cause and effect.


Rachel Van Helsing gets Drac-slapped in Tomb of Dracula #68 (Feb 1979)

Wonder Woman never has her breasts fly in opposite directions when she gets punched.

Strangeus Interruptus

There are two times I've felt completely ripped-off by a comic book. And by ripped-off I mean the publisher deliberately treated an audience with contempt. One was in the New Universe line when the year long story line in Justice, expanded upon with much coolness by Kieth Giffen was revealed to be a dream. The other is Doctor Strange #41. Perhaps not too strangely, both books were by Marvel.

There are lots of comic book events with sucky endings. In the old days before every story became THE BIG COMIC BOOK EVENT that we couldn't miss there was usually a long build-up, foreshadowing, hints and clues and then the great big fight, which often appeared in that book's annual or a special, double-sized issue.

While not a huge comic event the story in Doctor Strange, Master of the Mystic Arts #41 (June 1980) was one of the those issues where you ask yourself what the hell happened at the end of the story.

Written by Chris Claremont (first clue) with art by Gene Colan, issue #41 was the finale to an multi-issue epic featuring an insane Baron Mordo, who was trying to destroy all of creation. It was a story that had a cross-over into Man-Thing's own title and had sub-plots reaching back nearly a year.

Mordo had kidnapped friends of Dr. Strange and was feeding them to a demon that would open the Gates of Uncreation. This grisly scene of a girlfriend of Doc's getting her flesh stripped off is courtesy of Gene Colan.

Strange is then motivated by the death of his lover to do something (he sorta stood around while all the other people were eaten by the demon), screams NO! and he beats up on Mordo. Enraged, the Doc is about to kill Mordo in revenge when Claremont resorts to Comic Book Cliche #1, that of Situational Moral Superiority.
"If I killed you, I'd be no better than you." Spoken at least once by Superman, Spider-Man, Hulk, Lois Lane and just about every other comic book character you can think of.

Then just as the the universe is about to be unmade, Dr. Strange is simultaneously weaving spells to save creation while anchoring the Man-Thing with the mind of Ted Sallis to reality and Baron Mordo is creeping up behind the Doc to dash him in the head with a rock...this happens:

The climax of the story is a text panel? A FREAKING TEXT PANEL? Talk about a let down!

What went on here? Was production rushed? Did everyone just give up? Is it Claremont or the Editor? If no one cared enough about the story to give it the ending it deserved then they should have been creative enough to handle it like Warren Ellis did when he took over Strange for a time. In discarding the Vishanti War storyline that had been promised for several years Ellis simply wrote the Doc cleaning himself up in the bathroom after returning from another dimension, musing to himself "Well, that didn't take as long as I thought it would." Awesome.

Claremont then makes sure that after we fans are treated as if we were something unpleasant found on a shoe that we get a happy, sugar-coated ending and a return to the status quo.

Everybody is a-okay! Talk about a lucky break! Except for Ted Sallis, who gets magically lobotomized by Strange because a man trapped in a monster's body is a concept not worth exploring in the Marvel Universe. You know, another writer would have had all those people remain dead or, reveal later in another multi-issue epic that they were really animated corpses and slaves of the Chaos Demon putting its Plan B into motion for a return to Earth.

There was a joke back when Chris was writing for Marvel on all cylinders that everything he wrote sold well except for Spider-Woman. I think it was around 1980 and this issue of Doc Strange that I started looking at his work with a more critical eye and not just a fanboy consumer, even though i still enjoyed most of what he wrote. I still consumed comics by the longbox, buying titles because they were fun. It wasn't until the 90's that I really felt like I was throwing money in the street buying comics and except for the occasional favorite character pretty much stopped all purchases.

So this is what I think was the real climax to the story in Doctor Strange #41.

Tags: Dr. Strange Marvel Chris Claremont Gene Colan

Share the Gene Colan love!

Here's a Gene Colan-drawn tale of a girl trying way too hard to find love and romance. This is another cautionary story from the Marvel Romance Department credited to Stan Lee. Marge is unsuccessful at finding a boyfriend, even though she is cute and a lot of fun. After reading a romance comic book she happened to have lying around the house, Marge realizes that she is changing her behavior and sabotaging her own relationships. She then vows to change but just continues on the same course, not really changing even though she believes she does. She goes from one extreme to another.

Marge then takes relationship cues and adapts her behavior by emulating the characters from such sources as comic books and popular cinema all with disastrous results. Predictably, Marge tries and fails at love using one false persona after another until she finally takes on the long-forgotten character of the one special girl any boy would be sure to fall in love with!

But who could that be? Read and find out!


That's right! Marge choose to be just herself and found true love! Of course, her real self is a flaky, weird, neurotic schizoid with a tenuous grasp on reality as only Stan Lee could write her, but she's cute as heck! Yet, that is okay. As every boy knows, attractiveness goes a long way to balance out the crazy side of the scale.

From Our Love Story #36 (October 1975).

Give us Ultimate Mxyzptlk

While DC is rebooting (sorta) the DC Universe from the events in Infinite Crisis, I would like a return of one of the best portrayals of that 5th dimensional imp, Mxyzptlk, to the new DCU. While I liked the version as penned by Alan Moore in Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow? (that of a bored amoral extra-dimensional sorcerer), I really appreciated the Steve Gerber depictions of Dark Mxy. That guy was scary on so many levels. Gerber-Mxy was the type of guy who would turn your lungs into a yummy dessert treat just to watch you cough up Vanilla-Chocolate Swirls pudding. It isn't too much of a stretch to bring in the Gerber version from a vanished reality into the mainstream DCU, since they already paved the way with World's Funnest and Power Girl.

Steve Gerber wrote (in what one could call a "Marvelization" of DC) one of the better Pre-Crisis stories of the Superman mythos in the 1982 Phantom Zone mini-series. Basically, the mini was the Superman 2 movie done right. In that 4-issue run drawn by Comic Art God Gene Colan, while battling escaped PZ villains Superman learns that the Phantom Zone is not what he believed it was. What Superman assumed was a harmless limbo dimension that served as a "humane" prison first discovered by Kryptonians was actually a defensive barrier generated around an other-dimensional xenophobic entity named Aethyr.

It's a cool and actually mature story chock full of Gerbery goodness (not to mention a Gene Colan JLA). Gerber even tosses in a bit of comic continuity with a scene on that world with the donut-shaped sun that was in one of those Superman vs. Flash race stories back in the day.

Four years later it's Post-Crisis in the DCU, and in a Pre-Crisis story about the Zone prisoners, Steve Gerber and Rick Vietch revisit the concepts of the mini in the 1986 DC Comics Presents #97. This issue is horrifying and cruel in content. The Zone villains escape when Aethyr is manipulated by a Kryptonian magician and they attack Earth with a viciousness that rivals the destruction seen later in Byrne's Superman run, when the pocket-universe Kryptonians commit genocide. In this story Mxyzptlk merges with Aethyr as a way to escape his own prison and goes right around the bend.

His first act is to "tease" Superman by transporting the star-lost ghost-city of Argo to Earth directly over Metropolis...And then lets it fall. Superman smashes the asteroid even as he succumbs to radiation poisoning, scattering tons of Kryptonite and radioactive corpses over the entire cityscape. Since it's Mxy, Superman probably thinks he is just dealing with an unusually cruel prank that will magically repair itself once the imp leaves for other parts. Not this time.

The Mxy and Aethyr entity are insane. Rampant xenophobia, frustration and unlimited power makes for a wicked and unstable combo. After Superman heals a bit he gets into final battle with the escaped Zone villains. During the fight Superman is surprised when Mxy/Aethyr aids him by absorbing the villains into his consciousness not out of altruism, but to personally torture them just for kicks.
Interestingly, something similar also happened in Gerber's back-up story in the Bloodstone finale written years prior in Marvel's 1978 Rampaging Hulk magazine.

Too bad for readers that it was all erased as this version of the imp had lots of promise (and as an added bonus Gerber also reintroduced kryptonite and free for the black market Kryptonian technology in the form of the contents of the smashed Argo City back into the DCU). There are very few Mxy stories that are anything short of annoying and a waste of precious page space. Mxyzptlk is a character that is as poorly handled nearly as much as the Joker. Writers just don't know what to do with him because of his power levels. The introduction of a flawed god of chaos could have been good for years of tales and maybe even a great big cross-over event.

Dell's Money-Saving Monster Comic Book Cover

You could always tell when a Dell title was about to be cancelled when they published repeats of earlier covers. Dell saved money on cover artists by using an old issue when sales dropped below a certain point but the magazine was sent to press anyways. I'm not a businessman, but if your product is doing so badly that issue #4 is a reprint of issue #1, I think it is time to save the cash and call it quits. Dell was doing this in the biz a while ago so it may be that monies were already spent along the production channels that would not be refunded otherwise, so they went ahead with old material on the chance they would not lose their entire investment.

But in this one-shot they didn't even try to come up with an original cover. It is like Dell looked in the filing cabinet for the most generic pre-existing art they could find and glued a few head shots cut from other books onto it. Admittedly the background art is keeping with a dark theme by being set in a creepy field during sunset, but the lone figure isn't even the Frankenstein Monster, unless the creature has taken to wearing bowler hats.

The poor layout of the title also makes it appear the classic vampire was mummified somehow, which would not be a bad story itself. Of course, I'd only want to read that if Marv Wolfman wrote it and Gene Colan drew it.

Some Gene Colan art:
Shazam vs Dracula

Howard and Bev

Dracula meets Sherlock Holmes

Groin Injury Saturday: Dracula

Marvel had a great magazine with the Tomb of Dracula. Written for the most part by Marv Wolfman and drawn in it's entirety by the master Gene Colan. It had a 70 issue run long after horror titles had faded and spawned several spin-offs. For my money, Colan is also one of the few artists who, like Kirby, can make a rendering of a punch look like it actually has some force behind it. You never see Sue Storm's breasts fly in opposite directions when she gets hit by Dr. Doom, do you? One of Dracula's most tenacious foes was Blade. This revenge-minded fellow had some cast-iron 'nads of his own, that's for sure. In his early appearances Blade was mostly mortal, no special vampire-given abilities other than light-sensitivity and was probably immune to bites. So when he goes at it against a creature that can fold a tank into a ball he's either retarded or very brave. In most of their altercations Blade and the other Marvel vampire hunters got their hindquarters handed to them by Drac. Blade never gave up though and often managed to stick Drac real good a few times, even killing him once. In this scene Blade is easily manhandled by Dracula. Blade fights dirty so of course he puts a boot to the vampire's crotch. Admirable try, but it didn't work very well. Colan is the only guy who should ever draw the Lord of the Vampires. Just look at Drac's face and the panic in Blade's features. Dracula, being strong and dead below the waist, shrugs off the hit. The plucky team of vampire hunters only escape by circumstance. It was shown early in the Marvel Dracula books that the Lord of the Vampires is a force of nature and evil personified, but he's also impotent. Once turned into a creature of the night, Dracula lost his soul. The souless undead, as it has been shown in various Marvel horror titles, can't appreciate things like music and sex. In fact, it took a cult of devil-worshippers to cast a spell that let Vlad get a different kind of wood so he could impregnate a human female. So for this weeks entry I have to say it wasn't Blade, as good as he is, that caused the groin injury. Rather, it was the emasculating evil of the Curse of the Vampire! I could take being a monster, just make sure that some parts are less undead than others. Tags: Groin Injury Saturday

Happy Birthday, Gene Colan!

Have a very Meta-Birthday!

From Tower of Shadows #6 (July 1970).

Lots more Gene here!

Oh, Those Glowing Vaginas

There has been a lot of talk in the Internet and forums lately about Glowing Vaginas.

Specifically, the one belonging to mutant witch Wanda Maximoff in the Marvel Comics crossover event House of M. I won't go to into detail about the series because, well...it's written by the over-worked and stretched-too-thin Brian Bendis. If your search result didn't bring you here by accident then you know all about it. If you got here by clicking on what you thought was an "interesting" link, then look it up yourselves. But I'll give you a little background.

Wanda, aka the Scarlet Witch, is able to re-order reality at her whim. Unbalanced mentally, she had a breakdown when a group of poorly-written superheroes lacking their established characterization banded together to kill her to stop the alterations sweeping the world. At the end of House of M #1, everyone but Spider-Man and Wanda has blinked out of existence. Then Wanda opens up her Big Glowing Vagina and the world as anyone knew it ceases to exist in a wash of bright light and starts over from scratch, completely different.

Now word has come around (I assume from Marvel) that in spite of what everyone is saying, the image I'll show here a bit further down, is not a vagina. Please. Who are they kidding? Of course they have to deny it or else Hillary Clinton will divert federal funds that should be fixing schools to investigate comic book imagery.

So here they are....judge for yourself.

House of M #1 - Not too healthy-looking, young lady...

Mutopia #1 - Oh my, indeed

And in the same time period is a much prettier Glowing Vagina in DC's Return of Donna Troy.

'Starship of the Gods' Yep, that's what I usually call it, too

Unfortunately, as cute as it is, it doesn't belong to hottie Donna.

Nope, it belongs to this guy.

That's right. The best-looking vagina in a comic book belongs to a guy.

Here's a golden-oldie from DC, written in the time known as 'Pre-Crisis', from the Phantom Zone mini-series drawn by Gene Colan, featuring the Man of Steel, Superman.


Of course, Marvel, being a leader in the comic field, is not content to stop with vaginas. They plunge on ahead with this, from the X-Men.

What is she going to do with that, you suppose?

Just so comic books aren't left holding the bag, here are some more images and not just from comics.





I don't mind the writers or artists sneaking in a suggestive image or three. Just don't be so obvious about it, is all I'm saying.

Take an artistic hint from the Morrison/Van Sciver 'subliminal sex' opus in New X-Men #118 for the clever way to do it.