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Here's a brief post simply to showcase the above cover by John Buscema, who was surely the finest artist ever to draw The Avengers. The quality of interior reproduction isn't as good as it should be and two pages have been edited out, there being only 18 altogether instead of the usual 20. (Around 1970, Marvel mags really only had 19 pages, though by printing two half-pages with ads below each one, the numbering still consisted of 1-20.) I can't detect any obvious 'jumps' and my Marvel Masterworks volumes are tucked away somewhere, so I can't compare this MTA reprint of Avengers #51 with a later, fuller reprint, so the editing has been executed better than was usual in such instances.
Anyway, not that it matters much as I'm only offering you the cover to appreciate, not the contents, so enjoy Big John's art at its finest.
8 comments:
That's one of my all time favourite Avengers covers.
It certainly is a beauty, McS. I don't think he ever drew a bad one.
Both in the original printing and this reprint, Goliath is colored (or is that "coloured" my British buddy?) incorrectly, since he had implemented a different color/colour scheme similar to his previous Ant-Man/Giant-Man costumes as of this issue until he began his tenure as Yellowjacket in #59.
There's a footnote on the original printing's splash page about it, which I presume is also on the reprint's splash.
Plus, I wonder if the reprint's cover art was from a photostat of an earlier version of the cover since the background and machinery are differently-placed from the published cover!
https://files1.comics.org//img/gcd/covers_by_id/19/w400/19050.jpg
Personally, I liked the original since it has a cramped feeling that accentuated Hank Pym's huge form!
But, either way, it shows JB's mastery of the medium!
There were a lot of "slightly-different" covers (showing characters repositioned or rendered differently) on the 1970s reprint books like Triple Action, Marvel's Greatest Comics, Marvel Super-Heroes, and Marvel Tales, indicating use of such photostats...when there weren't totally-new covers on the books, that is!
Nope, there's no footnote on the splash of the reprint, AKC - could it have been on the next issue after they'd noticed their mistake? I suppose MTA was simply colouring the strip after the original, mistake and all, but they could've corrected it - strange that they didn't.
As you know (and say), many Marvel covers were amended in some way before printing, though they were photostatted in their original form before any changes were made so I'd say your guess about the reprint cover being from a pre-altered stat is spot-on. The Masterworks reprint volumes usually included such alternate covers, which I thought was a good thing. Sometimes, though, I did wonder if the altered covers were much of an improvement.
Thanks for commenting, feel free to drop in anytime.
As much as I like the AVENGERS work of George Perez-- who in my world is certainly the first runner-up to Buscema-- Perez never managed to make the characters have the same "grandiosity" as we see in covers like this one. Often if not always, Perez crowded all the characters on the same level, and made little if any use of negative space. If I remember one of JB's rare interviews correctly, he always wanted to be a commercial illustrator, possibly with emphasis on book illos like Wyeth, and comics were just a way to pay the bills. Yet no book illustrations would have been as celebrated in the late 20th as JB's work on AVENGERS, SILVER SURFER and CONAN, and in book illos he could never have melded such disparate influences as Kirby and Hogarth. Sad, but he was from the generation that placed no value on comics, and few creators from that generation ever changed their minds on the subject of respectability.
It always surprised me that Big John seemed to have nothing but disdain for comics, GP. (Superhero comics anyway.) Some people suspected he indulged in a little hyperbole regarding his dislike, simply out of a sense of 'impish' mischief, and because he liked to see the looks of astonishment when he said this. However, he was certainly amongst the very top tier of comicbook artist, and if there's any justice in this world, the man and his art will endure forever. Thanks for commenting, you always have something interesting to say. (As do other Crivvies Of course.)
Good point that JB may have sometimes wanted to poke at his fans. His contemporary Julie Schwartz was worse, gleefully telling fans that the comics he'd worked on were just junk, meant to be read on the crapper.
He was at a comics convention in France (I think) once, GP, and he found the reaction to his assertion that comics were cr*p highly amusing. He recounts the tale in 'The Art Of John Buscema'.
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