Great Covers #4 – Batman 310 & 319 by Joe Kubert

Batman 310 cover

Batman 319 cover

I chose these two covers as a showcase of Joe Kubert’s art, well, frankly because they include Batman and Gentleman Ghost. There are a great many Kubert covers that show his ability, but these two just happen to include two of my favourite characters.

Kubert’s greatest strength is his ability to portray the human form naturally. If you have any doubt about this I’d direct you to pretty much any panel of Tarzan that Kubert drew, they are perfect representations.

In terms of the covers selected for this post, in the first, Batman 310, my attention is drawn more to the horses that the humans. Whilst Batman & GG are drawn dynamically enough, look at the emotion that Kubert has imbued into the horses. Kubert had a great deal of experience drawing animals, again in Tarzan, and it shows in this cover. The slightly ungainly but very natural spread of the animals legs, and of course those horses eyes are incredibly emotive, particularly the one visible eye of the leading horse. It may sound odd, but think about how many artists have difficultly rendering recognizable emotions on to human characters without the addition of dialogue boxes to help them along. Kubert can show you what a horse is thinking, let alone a human.

On the cover of Batman 319, it’s all about the Batman. It goes without saying that Kubert’s grasp of human anatomy is impeccable, but what I really like about this cover is Batman’s posture. At first glance his body seems to be relaxed, with his attention focused on to GG, but look at his legs, slightly splayed, and his arms too, again slightly bent at the elbows and maybe tipping his body weight over to his right. This is a guy that’s been drawn to look relaxed, but is really a loaded spring ready to explode at a moments notice. I hate to keep on mentioning this, but this is another recurring theme handed over from the Tarzan books.

So for anyone reading this and looking for Joe Kubert recommendations, top of the list for incredible art would be the Tarzan: the Joe Kubert Years, three volumes published by Dark Horse. But a very, very close second place would be the Enemy Ace stories, available as either a single Showcase Presents volume or two Archive Editions from DC.

Happy Reading,

Mad Thinker.

Great Covers #3 - Jack Kirby’s Mister Miracle

I wanted to do a “Great Covers” for Jack Kirby’s Mister Miracle because I love ‘em and they’re also some of the few original printings of Kirby that I own. But I just couldn’t decide on a single issue. So here we are with a four cover collage.

Starting top left and working clockwise we have #1, #6, #9 and #13 of Mister Miracle vol. 1. Cover dates between March 1971 and March 1973.

These are excellent examples of Kirby in full swing of his third wind. His first being his initial employment (notably with Joe Simon) in the Golden Age, then his legendary resurgence in the early sixties creating the modern Marvel mythology (alliteration unintended), and then this in the seventies, a superb series of inter-related titles known as the Fourth World.

The Fourth World books were woefully underselling at the time and ended up being prematurely cancelled, but today, like his work for Marvel, they’ve provided a spine for the Cosmic stories of the DC Universe and are seen as the great body of work that they are.

No one can draw power and dynamism like Kirby. Mark Evanier says in his Kirby biography, Kirby: King of Comics, that Jack would start his drawing from the top left of the page and work down to the bottom right, as if he could already see the finished piece before him.

Jack, if you were a living woman of similar age, I’d kiss you.

Mad Thinker

Great Covers #2 – Space Adventures 10, Steve Ditko

Space Adventures # 10, Spring 1954, by Steve Ditko

An early cover by Ditko. He’d been professional since 1953 and his first published cover was on a comic cover dated February 1954, (The Thing #12) also pulished by Charlton, a company he had a long standing association with.

I don’t know how many covers he’d had printed prior to this but the date suggests it could have only been a handful. To my eye it shows that he found his mature style early in his career. It’s pure Ditko and recognizable at a glance.

What Kirby does for heroics and energy, Ditko does for menace, paranoia and base fear. Ditko’s work was often inked by himself too (unlike Kirby) so what you see is exactly what he wanted to produce.

This cover was used for the black and white reprint collection Steve Ditko: Space Wars, published by Vanguard, ISBN: 9781887591676, which I intend to write about in the not too distant future.

Mad Thinker

Great Covers #1- Thor 243, Gil Kane

Thor # 243, January 1976, by Gil Kane

Probably my favourite cover of all time.
Gil Kane can make me believe that a Norse God fighting Mongolian warriors, a dinosaur and flying Space Police is something that he's seen.

If only Thor had been a frog in this issue.