...damn, what a difference an artist of Colan's caliber has on a comic!
Take the early Iron Man stories in A Tribute To Gene Colan, for instance. Now, this isn't what I consider Colan at his apex, when he found an inker like Tom Palmer who knew how to really interpret what Palmer calls his "cinematic soft pencil rendering." But Colan just gave so much added value to those Tales Of Suspense issues. From the dramatic angles to the realism of the faces. Even Iron Man's immovable mask is bent in a powerful grimace that seems to emote.
But it's in Tomb of Dracula that Colan, in my opinion, really hit his stride. Dracula, as depicted in a way only Gene Colan could, looks like Satan himself. Not even horror movies have been able to capture a menacing enough Dracula in images (I love Bela Lugosi and all, but he's really sort of cuddly in comparison).
What really blows my mind, however, is how much product artists like him would put out back then. And the writers, too. And how long some of them would stay on runs.
Good stuff.
Oh yeah, now THAT'S the stuff. Gene Colan is awesome, no doubt. Sometimes his work with Tom Palmer on Tomb of Dracula looks uncannily like Al Williamson's stuff. Which is a high compliment indeed.
ReplyDeleteI love Colan's sense of mood. Realism that's slightly skewed by use of interesting "camera" angles, especially the worm's eye view. He has a superior ability to delineate movement. And his characters are incredibly limber, too. But mood, mood, mood. Shadows and creepiness. Palmer interpreted his shading to perfection.
Also, Colan could draw classically beautiful characters like Frank Drake and Rachel van Helsing (scars and all), then ugly it up with people like Harold H. Harold and Anton Lupenski.
With Marv Wolfman writing his ass off? Tomb is a regular Halloween tradition for me. I read it all October.
Oh... and yeah, his Dracula is my favorite, bar none. Powerful, regal, sinister... sometimes grotesque.
ReplyDeleteColan is a titan. The rendering, the angels, the motion... Good catch on the Dracula stuff. One thing working against all the vampire movies that have been made between when I was a kid and now is that they could never look as cool as Colan's comics.
ReplyDeleteGene Colan was one of those artists I got later on in life. As a teenager in the 1980s I thought he was sloppy and ugly looking. Now I love his work. My favourite work of his is the Nathaniel Dusk DC detective series which just used his pencils, the second miniseries in particular is gorgeous to look at. But his Howard the Duck is stunning-- I don't think I've seen an artist more sympatico with a writer than Colan illustrating Gerber.
ReplyDeleteAnd you're right, it's incredilbe that guys like Colan could do runs of 50 and 60 issues at a time. The marketplace would never allow for that now-- even if they could have that output (a rarity), the readership would get bored.
I loved his Dr. Strange and Dracula runs. His style so suited the mystical and magical...
ReplyDeleteWe communicated through Emails a few years ago he was great to get to know (as little as one can through Email)...
A Marvel master!
ArrrOOOooo!
I loved Colan on Tomb of Dracula growing up. His best work ever, though Dr. Strange was good, as well.
ReplyDeleteDang. I missed this post. Probably too late to comment and have anybody read it, but...
ReplyDeleteTomb of Dracula is one of the best comic books Marvel has ever put out. The stories and art were far, far ahead of most other books of the day. I remember this one panel where there's a skeleton with a note pinned to it that said "You Killed Me!" I can't even remember the context right now, but that image scared the bejeebus out of me when I was young.
I loved Mr. Colan's Daredevil also, much moreso than any artist who came after, even though (for the most part) the stories weren't on par with the art.