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Still got some leftover festive money burning a hole in your pocket? Then ponder no more on how you might part with it, frantic ones, 'cos I have some suggestions for you. Cop a gander at these four tomes, which are worthy additions to any comic fan's bookshelves. Rather than tell you about them ('cos I'm a lazy git), I direct you to the back covers, where all the spiel you require to make an informed decision awaits you.
Which one floats your boat the most? Can't decide? Then buy all four of them and spare yourself the angst of having to choose between them. Problem solved! Scurry straight round to your nearest comics shop and press some paltry pounds into the palms of those polite purveyors of pulse-pounding pleasures - that's books, Melvin! So why are you still here? Raid the piggy bank and get going!
I would so get the Trimpe book. Don heck ... If he had a good inker. His layouts were fine and his Wood inked stuff was good, but a less detailed inker not so good. Also all his women looked vaguely Asian. Good for me, but I wonder did anyone else notice?
ReplyDeleteToth.. Hmm. Critics loved him. I thought he was good depending. He could do lots of things but his superhero stuff ended up looking like guys dressed in costumes know what I mean.
Curt Swan drew Superman you go hey it's Superman. Toth drew Supes and hey it's a guy in a costume.
In the main, I liked Heck when he inked his own pencils. Roy Thomas made a good point once, saying that with Heck's later work, some of his figures looked as if they'd been filled with helium and were just floating - they didn't have the 'weight' of Kirby's figures. When Heck was good he was great 'though.
ReplyDeleteI really liked Don Heck's art when I saw his Cap's Kooky Quartet-era Avengers. He was one of my favorites, based on that, but when I saw his later work in the 70's, I still liked it, but a lot of times, it seemed rushed. By the time, he was drawing the Justice League in the late 70's/early 80's, it depended on who was inking him, as you guys said.
ReplyDeleteI didn't know much about Toth until the 70's, when I saw him draw Batman and Black Canary. I really liked his panels, the way they were framed, almost like camera angles. I later saw his work in the 40's in the DC reprints and liked it, too.
I wasn't a big fan of the Hulk, so I really didn't know much about Trimpe until he moved on to other characters. He was always a good dependable artist. Sometimes, in the late 70's/early 80's, I would see who was drawing the issue before I bought it, and I usually bought one if he was drawing it.
Yeah, Heck's art did become a little too loose for me in the '70s, but he was still good - just not as good as he had once been. Reading interviews with him in the book 'though, he seems to think that his art was better during the '70s. As for Trimpe, G, you really should track down some collected editions of his Hulk work when he was inked by John Severin - top stuff indeed.
ReplyDeleteEveryone of these artists were top drawer but Toth was a genius (I wont say "imho" he just was) one of the greatest comic artists ever (just not a great Superhero artist) I have most of the originals in that Toth collection but I'm interested in picking it up now I've seen it here again. I definitely want the Trimpe one (amazing cover I think that was a poster in the 60s or 70s) Hulk was my favourite comic back in the day (with John Severin inks in particular) so i 'll check Forbidden Planet for this edition on pay day. Even although he did some really awful stuff (Ka-Zar) I'm still a big Don Heck fan (his Avengers and Iron Man work are still firm favourites of mine) but I had a look at this book recently and personally didn't think it was worth the price asked (imho its better to get a collection of his Marvel stuff or his recent 50s horror reprints)
ReplyDeleteI'm not overly familiar with Toth's work, I have to confess, McS. I've seen his stuff over the years of course, but not too much of it. I'm not too keen on his lettering, which was neat, but too stylized and too tightly crammed sometimes to read easily. Contrariwise, sometimes his captions and word balloons were too big on the page, so perhaps he was experimenting. The Heck book is okay, and it's nice to see him getting his due, but he does seem to attribute the poor reception of some of his later work to 'bad inking' by others, which I'm not convinced is entirely the case. Sure, good inkers certainly enhanced his work, but sometimes his art failed to score on its own (lack of) merit. However, loved his Iron Man and Avengers, as you say.
ReplyDeleteI know what you mean re Toths lettering I think he tried to make it part od his art rather than being needed to be read - if you get a chance to look inside this book I think you will be impressed.
ReplyDeleteGot it, looked, and not too impressed with some of the lettering, McS. Still to read it 'though.
ReplyDelete