The Captain America Project: 20 artists, 20 drawings of Captain America on one page.
#13: Jim Lee (Justice League, All Star Batman and Robin, X-Men, WildC.A.T.S.)
I wrapped up an incredible haul from 2010’s Big Apple Con and New York Comic Con with this amazing Captain America sketch from the great Jim Lee. I uploaded a larger than usual image to show the texture and shading from the exposed pencil lines bringing out a darker mood in Cap’s expression. This is an amazing sketch.
The New York Comic Con was held October 11-14 at the Jacob Javitz Convention Center in New York City. This was my sixth time attending the show in the last seven years and I’m amazed at how much the convention has grown since the first NYCC in 2006. If I remember correctly, that first NYCC was in a space no bigger than this year’s Artist Alley and was relegated to the lower level of the Javitz Center. Now it takes up the entire convention center and it’s still barely enough space for the thousands of comic fans and cosplayers that attend.
NYCC started on Thursday but I had a three day pass beginning on Friday. I left work early Friday afternoon and cabbed it to the Javitz Center. There was a good crowd at the Javitz Friday afternoon, but despite the number of people on line the wait time to get in was minimal (on all of the three days I attended) thanks to the fantastic planning by the event organizers Reed Exhibition Companies.
First stop: Artist Alley!
For me NYCC has always been about meeting the comic book writers and artists in attendance, particularly the men and women whose work I read from 1977-1989, and this show didn’t disappoint. I had spent the week prior to NYCC looking over the list of comic creators that would be in attendance and putting together a list of who I would try to get sketches from. My list ran down an entire page and would have cost me about a month’s salary if I was able to get all of the proposed sketches, so I scaled it down to my “must haves.”
The first artist I met was Rick Leonardi, penciller of many Marvel titles including Cloak & Dagger, The Uncanny X-Men, and Spider-Man 2099 just to name a few. I’ve been a big fan of his over the years, and at last year’s show I had commissioned a sketch of Cloak and Dagger from him that is one of my favorite pieces of art in my personal collection. Lucky for me Rick’s sketch list wasn’t filled up yet when I arrived. I asked for a Dr. Strange and he hit this one out of the park. This sketch is definitely one of the highlights of my book. He even added Kirby crackle!
Dr. Strange sketch by Rick Leonardi.
2012 New York Comic Con
Next up was one of my favorite inkers, Bob Wiacek. His run on The Uncanny X-Men with penciller Paul Smith in the early 80’s is one of my all time favorites. I decided to get a Wolverine sketch on 11″x17″ comic art board based on Paul Smith’s amazing cover from Uncanny X-Men #173. I initially asked Bob to draw Wolverine only with the intention of having another artist draw Rogue, but I quickly changed my mind and asked him to include Rogue as well for a full cover recreation. He showed me the pencils on Saturday, which were AMAZING, and the commission will be fully inked and FedExed to me this week. Needless to say, this will be the signature piece of my comic art collection.
Going into the show I had a Tony Daniel sketch on my wish list, and I was able to get not one, but TWO sketches from Tony on Saturday and Sunday. First up was a sketch card of Poison Ivy, followed by a sketch of Harley Quinn in my sketch book. Not only is Tony an amazing artist, he is one of the nicest people I have met in my years of attending comic conventions.
Poison Ivy
Drawn by Tony Daniel
Tony Daniel shows off a Harley Quinn sketch
I was also fortunate enough to get this great Savage Dragon sketch from Erik Larsen. The hits just keep on coming!
One of the highlights of the weekend was chatting with several of the creators in attendance about their work. I have a copy of Marvel: Five Fabulous Decades of the World’s Greatest Comics by Les Daniels and decided to get the Marvel alumni in attendance to autograph the inside cover. I walked up to Louise Simonson’s table for an autograph and was surprised to see former artist/editor Carl Potts. I had a great conversation with both of them and mentioned to Carl that I’m proud the owner of a page he drew from Alien Legion #4 (inked by Terry Austin). Bob McLeod was very generous with his time discussing the creation of The New Mutants (post to follow!).
I walked the exhibit hall floor a few times, mainly to check out the original comic art for sale. I fully expected the number of attendees to peak on Saturday, but the show floor was also crowded on Friday and Sunday. After awhile I decided to stick with Artist Alley.
I did buy one piece of published original comic art over the weekend, a religious themed page drawn by Rick Leonardi and inked by Joe Rubinstein from a story they collaborated on back in the 90’s. I won’t give too much information on the piece because I’m hoping to write a blog post on it for the Holidays. But I will say it was a page that I wanted to buy when I first saw it online, but never thought I would have the chance to purchase it. Now it’s officially part of my “not for sale” collection.
I had a fantastic time at NYCC over the weekend and overall I thought the show was an amazing success. This picture pretty much sums up for me:
The Atari 2600 game console, that iconic device that allowed us to play such arcade favorites as Space Invaders and Asteroids in our own homes, turned 35 on October 14th. Along with the Commodore 64, this little machine helped define my youth in the 80’s.
The console was introduced in 1977, but we bought ours around 1981 in what was probably my family’s first case of “keeping up with the Jones’s.” When we got home from school, we fired up the Atari and played until it was time to do our homework. When we met up with our friends the only question was which house we were playing Atari in.
The 2600 came with the game Combat included in the box and our first game purchase was Space Invaders. If I remember correctly, by pressing the Game Reset button while turning the power on, you were able to play Space Invaders with rapid fire. Every other week or so my brother and I would go to our local department store’s video game section and browse for our next purchase. Many of the Atari game boxes and cartridges had incredible painted artwork that could have easily been the covers to science fiction paperbacks.
Looking back, the games we enjoyed the most were Missile Command, Asteroids, and my all time favorite Defender. But the one game I played more than any other was Pitfall. When I think back about the games we had at that time, I’m really puzzled why Pitfall took up more of our playing time than any other game considering it was much simpler in play and graphics.
To this day, I still prefer these older Atari games (and Commodore 64) to current video games. A couple of months back, Microsoft and Atari released online versions of eight classic Atari games. I couldn’t stop playing Asteroids the night I discovered this, and it made me want to break out the old 2600 again. I still have our original console and game cartridges, but unfortunately the controllers didn’t make it past the 80’s. One of these days I’ll have to buy a pair off of eBay and fire up the old machine for a game of Defender!
Some of the most memorable and influential comic books of my youth were bought during my childhood trips to Italy. I’m fortunate enough to return to Italy every couple of years for a vacation and each trip to a newsstand in Rome or the countryside brings back memories of me and my brother plunking down a few hundred lire (courtesy of my father) here and there on a copy of Sergio Bonelli’s classic long running Western comic book Tex.
Tex #216 (October 1978)
One thing I’ve always enjoyed about Tex is regardless of which decade I was buying the black and white digest, the art and writing has always been consistent, which is refreshing to see compared to books and characters that go through radical changes just to drum up sales. Tex is a testament to how a publisher respects its characters and more importantly, its loyal fan base.
But our favorite Italian comic books were the super eroi, particularly L’Uomo Ragno and I Fantastici Quattro, who were none other than Spider-Man and The Fantastic Four! Sure, we had been reading Spidey and FF prior to our first trips to Italy, but the Italian reprints we read in the late 70s were from Marvel stories originally published ten to fifteen years earlier and gave us our first exposure to the Silver Age artwork of Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby.
Lucky for us, the Silver Age was in full swing in late 1970’s Italy. The Italian language seemed to add more drama and gravity to the dialogue, and the characters names even sounded cool when they were translated into Italian. Dr. Doom was Dottore Destino! The Thing was La Cosa! The Human Torch was Torcia Umana! The Eternals were Gli Eterni. I wasn’t able to read Italian very well back then, but it didn’t matter because the clarity of the storytelling in Kirby and Ditko’s artwork allowed me to follow the stories without relying as much on the dialogue.
I wish I still had those old comic books. I see a few issues of L’Uomo Ragno in eBay once in awhile, but I can’t afford the prices listed. On my recent trip to Italy I was happy to still see Tex at all of the newsstands. But when I stopped in a Hudson News in Milan’s Malpensa airport, I was even happier to see my old Silver Age Marvel favorites in the Italian language Marvel Masterworks.
Like 35 years ago, I was reading classic Lee and Kirby stories with Italian word balloons. And a new generation of Italian comic book fans could now appreciate the art of Ditko’s L’Uomo Ragno, Kirby and Colletta’s Thor, and be blown away by La Visione on the cover of I Vindicatori (The Avengers).
The Captain America Project: 20 artists, 20 drawings of Captain America on one page.
#12: Adam Hughes (Before Watchmen: Dr. Manhattan, Cover Run)
Hi folks! I just got back from an amazing vacation in Italy, hence the lack of posts the last few weeks. I have a few Italy related posts in the pipeline, but I figured the best way to get back in the swing of things on Fante’s Inferno was with a post on the Captain America Project.
The twelfth spot on my Captain America jam page belongs to the amazing Adam Hughes. I’ve seen him at the New York comic conventions over the years and I never get tired of watching him draw. He was drawing quick sketches at the 2010 New York Comic Con in return for donations to a charity he was raising funds for and I was fortunate to get a Captain America head sketch.
I really like that the pencil lines are still visible underneath the inks. It’s amazing how much strength Hughes was able to capture in Cap’s expression with only a few lines.
Fante’s Inferno revisits the films of the Summer of 1982, considered the greatest movie summer for fantasy and sci-fi fans.
Release date: June 11, 1982
Directed by Steven Spielberg; Screenplay by Melissa Mathison
Starring: Henry Thomas, Drew Barrymore, Dee Wallace, Peter Coyote, Robert McNaughton
See the original trailer here.
How is it Labor Day already? Seems like just last week I was writing my first post on the Summer of ’82 and screening Conan the Barbarian!
I’ve been putting off writing this post for as long as possible this past week. Over the last two months I’ve had such a great time revisiting the films of the Summer of ’82, that (like summer vacation) I didn’t want it to end. This retrospective has brought me back to one of the most memorable summers of my youth, almost as if I’ve been living the summers of 1982 and 2012 in parallel.
Looking back at the lineup of movie releases that summer was mind boggling. It’s only fitting that I wrap up my personal journey through the films of the Summer of ’82 with that summer’s mega-blockbuster: Steven Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial.
E.T. was one of the only films I had to stand in line halfway down the block for during its opening weekend. The buzz in the lobby really made it feel like an event, and if I remember correctly our local theater booked E.T. into two of its four screens, a rarity back then. The crowd was an mix of kids, teenagers and adults, which was a testament to how Steven Spielberg was able to make E.T. accessible across generations. A couple of posts back I compared Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan to the cleanup hitter on a baseball team. Even though Khan is my favorite film from the Summer of ’82, Spielberg’s record breaking E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial would be the League MVP based on its phenomenal box office that year ($359 million in North America, $619 million worldwide).
E.T. is one of those movies that had each element hit the right note to create a flawless film. Screenwriter Melissa Mathison used elements from Spielberg’s unproduced project Night Skies in her screenplay, and wove together the themes of isolation, loneliness and friendship to create a story filled with characters that are more than just caricatures to support the cute little alien. Spielberg brought out fantastic performances in the young cast led by Henry Thomas as Elliot and supported by Robert MacNaughton and Drew Barrymore as his siblings Michael and Gertie. And who could forget John Williams’ incredible and inspiring score?
As much as I enjoyed E.T. when it was originally released, I thought that I was a bit too old for it at the time, which is strange when you consider Henry Thomas was also 10 when he played Elliot. At that young age I was on a steady diet of science fiction films like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien, and Outland. I chuckled when I watched the scene of Elliot’s brother and his friends playing a game that looked similar to Dungeons & Dragons at the beginning of the film. My first thought was “Looks like those guys are playing Basic D&D. Hmmmph, we play Advanced D&D!”
When E.T. was re-released in theaters in 2002, several of my friends who were also in their 30’s at that time had planned on seeing it as a group after work one night. I thought about joining them, but at the time I had a feeling that I wouldn’t have been able to enjoy the film with the same enthusiasm at age 30. Even though I now disagree with that original sentiment, I’m glad I didn’t watch E.T. ten years ago because it may have tainted my opinion of it during this retrospective on the Summer of ’82. And so at age 40 I watched E.T. in the spirit of my ten year old self and enjoyed it even more.
Fante’s Inferno revisits the films of the Summer of 1982, considered the greatest movie summer for fantasy and sci-fi fans.
Release Date: July 9, 1982
Written and Directed by Steven Lisberger
Starring: Jeff Bridges, David Warner, Bruce Boxleitner, Cindy Morgan
See the trailer here.
During the summer of 1982 I spent more than a few days at the local movie theater and comic shop, but my favorite hangout in my hometown was the local video arcade. Prior to the video game boom, the game room at Cook’s restaurant was filled with the sounds of pinball machines, skee ball and air hockey, but by 1982 it was in full swing with video games ranging from the classic Pac Man, Space Invaders and Missile Command to Battle Zone, Punch Out and my game of choice: Galaga. They were great games and still are. I don’t even want to attempt to estimate how many quarters I plunked into those machines from 1979 to 1986. On a recent trip to Cape Cod I was in a restaurant that had Galaga and I couldn’t resist playing a game or two, although nowadays when I see a pinball machine or video game with 50 cents or $1 per play my first reaction is “That is an outrage!”
Back in the Summer of ’82 I remember most of my friends going on and on about how cool Tron was. The special effects made it look like the type of video game we were hoping to see in our arcade sooner rather than later. You would think that a film like Tron would have had me camping out for the first screening, but looking back I don’t think I saw it in the theater. I don’t think I saw it more than once on cable TV either. How the heck did that happen?
I was starting to think I had missed out on a rite of passage and had to make up for lost time. My 42″ TV is pretty big for my apartment, but watching the first scenes that took place within the mainframe made me wish I had experienced watching Tron on the big screen at my local cinema back in 1982. The production design is simple even by 1982’s standards, but it reminds me of the vector graphics of several video games I played back in the day, particularly Battle Zone and the Star Wars arcade game. Tron’s beauty is in this simplicity, and it’s accented perfectly by the colors and lighting effects of the costumes designed by none other than the great Jean Giraud (aka Moebius).
Jeff Bridges (The Big Lebowski, The Fabulous Baker Boys, Iron Man) is always a pleasure to watch on film and David Warner (Time After Time, Time Bandits, Masada) is perfectly cast in Tron as his nemesis Sark. Warner’s performance, along with his performances as Jack the Ripper in Time After Time, Evil in Time Bandits, and Chancellor Gorkon in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Countrymake him in my opinion the consummate movie villain.
I love the concept of Jeff Bridges’ character Kevin Flynn experiencing the world within the mainframe system, but when I watched Tron again this week my one caveat was that even my ten year old self would have felt the circumstances leading to Flynn’s transportation into the inner world of the mainframe might have been a bit too simplistic. And like a few other films from the Summer of ’82 the pace was a little too slow for me.
Steven Lisberger created an amazing hybrid of fantasy and tech that was said to have been influenced by his first exposure to Pong in the mid-70’s. It’s funny how Pong, the simplest video game that is now used as a punch line when discussing technological advances, led to one of the boldest cinematic visions of the 80’s. The video games of the 80’s may not have had the graphics of Tron, but Tron gave video games something to aspire to. While it was a modest critical and box office success (it only grossed $33 million against its $17 million dollar budget), Lisberger should be praised for pushing the envelope to achieve a look that moviegoers still vividly remember 30 years later.
In honor the 50th anniversary of Spider-Man’s first appearance in Amazing Fantasy #15 in 1962, I wanted to write a post about my trip to see the Holy Grail of the Silver Age of comic books.
In November 2010 I took a weekend trip to Washington D.C. with my girlfriend. It was my first time in D.C. and the long weekend was packed with seeing the sights along the mall. I enjoyed every monument, memorial and museum we visited, but by Sunday I was slightly preoccupied with the thought of our plans for Monday morning’s visit to the Library of Congress. I wasn’t there to admire the architecture or take a tour, I had some research to do. About a month earlier I had contacted curator Sara Duke of the Prints and Photographs Division in order to schedule our appointment, and from that moment I was counting the days.
If there’s one thing I’m passionate about it’s comic book art, as both an admirer and collector. Each published page of original art is a piece of history, with a select few pages fitting into the category of monumental. When I think of the most culturally significant comic book stories, the first few that come to mind are the first appearance of Superman in Action Comics #1, the first appearance of Batman in Detective Comics #27, Fantastic Four #1 ushering in the Marvel Age of comic books, and of course the first appearance of Spider-Man in Amazing Fantasy #15.
In 2008 an anonymous donor had donated all of the original pages of art from Amazing Fantasy #15 to the Library of Congress. How this anonymous donor had originally acquired these pages has not been made public. Considering how much artwork from the Golden and Silver Ages has been destroyed, lost, or stolen, it’s a miracle that every page from this issue was saved. My mission, with my trusty (and extremely patient) sidekick, was to schedule time to see the complete Spider-Man origin story in its original drawn form.
I woke up at 7:00 AM that Monday morning. Anyone who knows me knows that I never get up at 7:00 AM. Ever. But that morning was different. We had a short window of time that began at 9:30 AM sharp and we had to make the most of it. After all, this is the first appearance of Spider-Man and there’s probably a list of folks lined up after us to see it, so I was going to make the most of every minute.
We arrived a little early, checked our backpacks with the security desk and signed up for our research cards. By the time we made it up to the research room, my spider-sense was tingling. Sara met us when we arrived and wheeled out a cart with several large folders. Not only did she pull the original Spider-Man pages from Amazing Fantasy #15 for us to view, she was also kind enough to pull the original comic art to the other three stories that comprised the issue, twenty six pages in all.
I opened the first folder, and there was the opening splash page of Peter Parker standing in the background, ostracized by Flash Thompson and the cool kids. One thing that struck me right away was how much detail there was in Steve Ditko’s inks. Every reprint I had seen growing up was a copy of a copy and lost a lot of the detail in Ditko’s brush work. Seeing the original art allowed me to actually feel the disappointment and angst in the expression on Peter Parker’s face.
At the top of the page is a paste up of the Spider-Man logo that covers Ditko’s original hand drawn logo. I wish I could have been in the room in 1962 to hear the reason for changing it. And if you look in the margins, Stan Lee’s original hand written notes “direct” some of the scenes in Ditko’s panels.
I took a lot of pictures, but unfortunately rights restrictions keep me from posting them. Thumbnails are available here at the Library’s website and you can order scans, but if you’re a fan of comic art I highly recommend seeing them in person.
We had a good hour to see all twenty six pages and were never rushed. Sarah sat with us the entire time and pointed out details that I never would have noticed. I thanked Sarah for her time, and mentioned that I would love to come back to see the pages again one day. I chuckled when I realized my tax dollars made me a part owner of them. By my calculations, which I won’t bore you with, I estimate that my personal portion of these 26 pages of original art is .000035 square inches of a page. Hey, I’ll take it!
This was a Bucket List moment for me, ranked up there with seeing Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel and statue of David (next up is Leonardo DaVinci’s The Last Supper). Prior to reading that article in 2008 about the LOC’s acquisition of the Amazing Fantasy #15 pages, I didn’t think they even existed. And now I saw them.
God Bless America.
But the story doesn’t end there. Prior to our bus ride back to New York, my faithful (and patient) sidekick surprised me with a copy of Marvel Masterworks: The Amazing Spider-Man Vol. 1, complete with scans of the original Spider-Man pages we had just seen that morning. She never ceases to amaze me.
These original pages to Amazing Fantasy #15 were featured on the History Channel back in 2009. That clip can be found here.
Amazing Fantasy #15 can be found in Amazing Spider-Man Masterworks #1 and Amazing Spider-Man Epic Collection: Great Responsibility on Amazon and Comixology, and The Amazing Spider-Man Omnibus #1 on Amazon. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Thank you for your support!
The Captain America Project: 20 artists, 20 drawings of Captain America on one page.
#11: Khoi Pham (Mighty Avengers, X-Factor)
The 2010 Big Apple Con was also a mother-lode of Captain America sketches for my jam page. Next up on my list was Khoi Pham. I love the line work on this panel. And even though only half of Cap’s face is visible, Pham brings out the intensity in Cap’s expression.
Fante’s Inferno revisits the Summer of 1982, considered the greatest movie summer for fantasy and sci-fi fans.
Release Date: August 13, 1982
Directed by Amy Heckerling; Screenplay by Cameron Crowe
Starring: Sean Penn, Phoebe Cates, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Forest Whitaker, Judge Reinhold, Brian Backer, Robert Romanus, Ray Walston
How could I have forgotten that Fast Times At Ridgemont High was released thirty years ago this summer?
Since I started this retrospective on the Summer of ’82, I’ve concentrated entirely on fantasy and sci-fi films and completely (and inadvertently) ignored one of the most memorable films of the 80’s. I’m sure none of you will fault me for including a film that doesn’t fit into the fantasy or sci-fi genre because it’s as enjoyable as any other film during the Summer of ’82. I was obviously too young to see Fast Times in the theater when it was released, although I’m sure there was a failed attempt or two to sneak in. However, what I missed in the theater in 1982 I gladly watched many times over on cable TV. Going into my freshman year of high school in 1986, I had seen Fast Times at Ridgemont High at least ten times.
This is a great film and it was a launching pad for many talented people. Sean Penn’s Jeff Spicoli was the poster child for stoner-dom. Judge Reinhold reminds us of our first job, our first heartbreak, and the car that got us there. Ray Walston was that one teacher that we couldn’t stand. Phoebe Cates gave us one of the most iconic shots of 80’s cinema.
Director Amy Heckerling took Cameron Crowe’s script, a young, but very talented cast, and a cool soundtrack and wove Fast Times at Ridgemont High into THE definitive high school film for those of us who grew up in the 80s. Contemporary high school films don’t have the depth of Fast Times, and they sure as hell don’t have the caliber of actors. Consider the number of awards earned by nine members of the cast and screenwriter Cameron Crowe over the subsequent course of their careers:
13 Academy Award nominations; 7 wins
18 Golden Globe nominations; 4 wins
13 Emmy Award Nominations; 4 wins
1 Grammy Award
Of all of the films I’ve re-watched from the Summer of ’82, this one made me the most nostalgic. It came out a few years before I started high school, but it reminded me of the days of hanging out at the video arcade (yes, we actually left the house to play video games), driving around in a friend’s beat up car, and enduring four years that most of us probably wouldn’t want to repeat. There were quite a few teachers from high school that I wouldn’t want to cross paths with again. But one thing that surprised me the most when I watched Fast Times at Ridgemont High again this week is the fact that I started to empathize with Mr. Hand (played perfectly by Ray Walston). Wow, I must be getting old.
Fante's Inferno 