Things I Never Did--1

Not Becoming a Marvel Inker

Recently my excavation of the Eternal Garage turned up more nostalgic oddities.

I moved Los Angeles in late 1976 or early 1977. Mark Evanier, leader of a cadre of fanboys who hung out together at the San Diego Comic Con, had advised me that if I wanted to draw comics professionally, I had two choices: either move to New York where the majors were located, or to Los Angeles where Disney and the animation industry were based.

I wanted to move to New York, but the prospect of moving across the continent to America's biggest city scared me shitless. I chose LA. However I did make one foray into the Big Apple. I stayed for several days with an aunt living in New Jersey. I took a train into the city to show my portfolio at Marvel and DC. It was to be my only visit to New York.

The difference between the companies was amazing. DC's lobby was an awe-inspiring piece of corporate design, with vast glass doors, expensive carpets, a cold receptionist and a huge logo on the wall. This I remember, but I don't remember much else about the meeting, not even with whom I met. I got a cordial but quick brush-off: some nice stuff here, keep drawing, move to New York.

I don't remember the Marvel lobby at all. What I recall is a nondescript hallway lined with doors. I was ushered into the office/studio of John Romita, Marvel's art director. Romita received me warmly and gave thorough yet gentle critiques of my drawings. He pulled open a drawer crammed with xeroxes of Marvel artwork. He offered me some sample pages to ink . He chose some by Marvel's tightest pencillers: covers by Jack Kirby and Gil Kane, interior pages by George Perez and George Tuska. He suggested I ink a couple on overlays and he'd evaluate them.

I'd planned my trip poorly. I visited Marvel on the next to last day of my vacation. I had no drawing equipment with me. I'd have to mail the inked pages from LA. Therein lay the biggest problem. Not many years later, working by mail became common. However at the time the majors dealt only with local artists. If I wanted to crack Marvel, Romita said, I'd have to move to New York.I sent in four covers and two interior pages. A week later I called Marvel but didn't reach Romita. A week later I failed to get through again. So I gave up. Thus ended my career as a Marvel inker.

These are the only copies I have of those sample jobs. I don't have any of the original pencils. Photocopies were expensive and the copy shop a long ways off, so I often didn't xerox stuff. Stupid. Anyway, I post these not because they're particularly good--they aren't-- but because they represent a crossroads in my life.

What if I'd been brave enough to take on NYC? Not long afterward Marvel underwent a big expansion and hired lots of new kids, some not much better than I was. I might have broken in. Surrounded by kindred souls, I might have learned the craft I never learned. I might have studied at one of New York's great art schools. I might have connected with one of the era's great teachers: Giordano, Adams, Buscema. I might have had some sort of career with the Big Guys.

On the other hand, I was a small town kid already over my head in Los Angeles. My life was in constant turmoil thanks to my undiagnosed manic-depression. I was afraid to ask favors or blow my own horn. I was shy, lonely, disorganized, and broke. Who's to say I wouldn't have been one of the thousands that New York ate alive?

By choosing LA I found a disastrous romance. Its implosion drove me to take a workshop where I met the marvelous lady to whom I've been married for nearly 30 years. Our marriage brought two fantastic kids who make me swell with pride.

It's this paradox that makes time travel stories popular. You're tantalized by good things that might have happened had you decided differently. At the same time you realize the good things in your life are the culmination of the decisions you did make, good and bad. You can only live one life at a time. So you live that one and write comics about the rest.

George Tuska, Comics Artist

Why Weren't the Tuska's Looser?

Lately Ger Apeldoorn has been posting a retrospective of work by George Tuska, one of the underrated comic artists of the 50s and 60s. Ger has a fine collection of both newspaper and comic book pages. I strongly recommend taking a look.

Seeing this work reminded me about an aspect of Tuska's work that puzzled me ever since my unsuccessful trip to New York in the 1980s seeking work from Marvel. Art director John Romita gave me photocopies of pencilled pages to ink as samples. He chose work by the tightest pencillers, so I went home with covers by Gil Kane and Jack Kirby, and interior pages by the Georges Perez and Tuska.

(At left is a page from Iron Man #8, in which Tuska got a better-than- average ink job from Johnny Craig.)

Tuska was the regular Iron Man penciller. He was almost always inked by Mike Esposito. Like most fans back then I found the book capable but dull--a judgement often applied to Tuska's work in general. Personally I'd always had a soft spot for Tuska, having grown up with his Buck Rogers newspaper strip. In college a collector friend introduced me to Tuska's crime strips for Lev Gleason. I gained a new appreciation for the artist. The crime comics showed a skill range that wasn't always obvious in Buck Rogers. Still, based on his Marvel art and his occasional appearances at Harvey and Gold Key, I'd concluded that Tuska was a competent artist with a somewhat simple, cartoon-oriented style that didn't belong in superhero comics.

(This page from Crime Does Not Pay is typical of George's Lev Gleason work, though some other strips were heavier on backgrounds. Two Gleason trademarks: some guy hit some other guy once a page, and the #@$%! dialogue was so heavy there was little room for the art.)

I wasn't ready for what I saw in his Iron Man pencils. They were beautiful! The first surprise was how fully they were rendered, sometimes almost to the point of being tonal drawings. Many pages, especially the "street clothes" pages, featured elaborately worked out light and shade. The action pages burst with both enthusiasm and careful drawing. The stuff knocked me out. I diligently (though unsuccessfully) tried to do them justice. One page I especially liked. Tony Stark was out of costume and floating in the East River. A tugboat rescued him, after which he returned home to maunder awhile. The lighting on this page was worthy of the finest Caniffist. Several months later the comic came out. That wonderful page had become a bland nonentity indistinguishable from the other equally lifeless pages in the issue. It wasn't like Esposito pulled a Colletta and ignored Tuska's pencils. The backgrounds were complete and the shadows were still there, but somehow all the life had been sucked out of them. Looking back I wonder if it was even possible to do them justice in ink.

(This pencilled panel, lifted from Kurt Busiek's website, is from later in Tuska's career. It's nice, but looser than the ones I remember.)

I came away with a new appreciation for Tuska's craft, but I was also puzzled by the disparity between these pencils and the way Tuska drew when he inked his own work. The assembly-line specialization of American comics encourages the presumption that "nobody can ink his own pencils." But whether an artist's inks are weak or strong, stylistically they usually resemble his pencilling. In Tuska's case it was almost as if two entirely different ways of thinking informed pencils and inks. Inked Tuska drawings were two-dimensional: postery, outline-driven, cartoon-like if you will. The Tuska pencilled drawings were three-dimensional, driven by light and form--illustration-like you could say.(This Scorchy Smith daily from 1959 is inked in the Buck Rogers style Tuska also used for his solo comic book work.)

A couple of years ago I found Tuska's official website, run by a relative or a friend or somebody with access to the artist. It was my chance to hear the artist's own thoughts about his differing styles. The webmaster passed my question to him and I received a cordial reply. Unfortunately my enquiry must not have been as clear as I thought, for Tuska answered an entirely different question. I felt it would be rude to press the issue, so I didn't write back. Now I'll never know.

I wish I had copies of those pages. Back when I did them, in the days before scanners, it was a big deal for a starving fanboy to find a copy shop and pay for oversize copies. I returned the copies with my inking samples and that was that.

(Postscript: I must confess that seeing those Iron Man pages prejudiced me, probably unfairly, against Mike Esposito's inking. This surely isn't fair to a major figure in the history of American comics, but when one starts out as a fan it's hard to shake the fannish propensity to judge artists by unrealistic standards.)