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.)

Technique Talk

Hail the Hallowed Halo
Many years ago Jim Vadeboncoeur and I interviewed the late John Buscema about his early career. At one point I asked him why he and other comic artists of the 50s and 60s put "halos" around characters rather than letting a black background touch them. Here's an example of what I mean, from a Golden Age Ruben Moreira story:

The halo preserves the outline of the co-pilot's face. In the printed comic the effect might be subdued by running a dark color over the halo so it becomes part of the background:

Too often comic book colorists chose a bright color, giving the character a radioactive glow:

When you look at it closely, though, the halo wasn't necessary. Had Moreira left the guy's nose open instead of in shadow, the background could have met the face and the face would have read just fine.

But comics artists often used halos when outlines didn't need preserving. Here's a particularly egregious example from Milton Caniff, who of all people should have known better. [Sidebar: I'm not convinced this is 100% Caniff; I suspect ghost work.] With the exception of Terry's left arm and Dude's shirt front, none of these edges needed saving. The halos here were apparently artistic, not practical, choices.

As for Buscema, he shrugged halos off as a stylistic trick comic artists adopted from illustrators they'd admired in school. This intrigued me, so I pulled out some tearsheets and went looking for halos.

I found quite a bit of evidence to support Buscema's theory. Many illustrators lightened the areas around characters, especially around their heads. Here are a couple of 1944 advertising examples.

The group of women is from an ad for Eureka vacuum cleaners. Note how each head is haloed. I understand using a halo to highlight the main figure. But halos don't make sense on the secondary figures, like the elderly woman and the one with the cap to the main figure's right. In the full-size reproduction we see that the grey background tones are hatched in with a brush, just like Caniff's black background.

In another ad, one pushing Wilsonite sunglasses, W. Calvert also uses a halo to emphasize the main character. I confess I reproduce this ad not only to show its artwork, but also to share the wonderfully-awful wartime pun in the headline. Anyway, consider the halo around the aviator. It certainly draws attention to the his face, the most important part of the picture. Unfortunately it also eats away much of a background figure. This partial figure looks really weird. Calvert would have been wiser to move him further back and to the right--or to leave him out altogether. I speculate that this figure was indeed fully painted at first. Calvert might have sponged out the halo later to prevent the background interfering with the aviator's head.

Which led me to wonder if some comic book halos weren't style at all, but the result of insufficient planning. Consider how a cartoonist can handle a large foreground black area. The classic choice is to position it against a white (or grey) part of the background. But what if the background is also black? There are two options. We can deliberately lose the foreground black into the background. George Tuska did that with Buck's hair in this Buck Rogers daily:

As long as you plan the black areas properly, the viewer will understand the drawing. As we'll see later, you can lose quite a bit of foreground black without your drawing becoming unreadable.

The second way to avoid losing a foreground black is to provide a rimlight to illuminate the endangered spot. That's what Austin Briggs did on Ming's helmet in this Flash Gordon panel:

A rimlight keeps the light "inside" the drawing. The result is a natural light effect instead of an artistic gimmick like a halo. Like the last one, this technique requires forethought. If you don't plan ahead you wind up with an abomination like this William Overgard Steve Roper panel:

This could only have happened if Overgard had drawn and inked the foreground completely, then decided he wanted a solid black background. Since the story takes place in a darkened room, you'd think he'd have inked the background first so he'd know which foreground blacks he could afford to lose. Or he could have spotted blacks in the pencils, so he'd know where he was going when he began to ink.

Working from dark to light is a great way to control blacks, but it's difficult to master and not many artists use the approach. Milton Caniff wrote that Noel Sickles worked dark to light, massing in all his shadows with a brush before indicating outlines with a pen. This work flow made panels like this possible:

Had Sickles outlined in pen first, we'd see more linework in the light areas. Instead he used the barest of lines to hold the foreground figure's face. The shadow carries the rest. The speaker's face is made entirely of shadow. The one exception is the line of his chin. Leaving that line out would have let the face run into the drapery.

Caniff said he tried to emulate Sickles' approach but gave up in frustration and went back to outlining everything in pen. Having tried both ways, I can appreciate how he felt. However if you can master working dark to light, you open up a whole a new world: the world of "invisible lines." Rather than describe what I mean with words, I offer a panel by one of the world's masters of black and white, Arturo del Castillo. Devour this:Every time I look at this panel I drool. The massing of blacks borders on audacious. With an alternating pattern of darks and lights del Castillo gives the figures a full three dimensions. Hardly anything has an outline. The exterior contours of hats, heads and bodies are defined entirely by the shadows enclosing them. Where there's no shadow there's no line. The viewer's brain provides the line. The middle man's back is as solid as can be, yet most of its light side doesn't exist! And how about the face of the guy on the right? It consists of nothing but perfectly placed chunks of shadow. Wow!

Here's another del Castillo panel, in which he pushes the imaginary outline to its maximum. Take a look at the white hat at the left.That hat's crown has height, depth, and roundness. Yet it's not there! The crown is all in our mind...the only things on the page are two big chunks of black. No halos here. None needed!

For my money this is the sort of thing to aspire to. Think ahead. Bravely allow those black backgrounds to touch your figures. (Of course, as del Castillo demonstrates, being a genius helps.)

Scorchy Smith--Just Passing Through

The Many Cooks of Scorchy Smith
Surrounded by online newspaper comic strip historians and collectors, I'm aware of the shortcomings of my knowledge. Almost everyone out there knows more than I do about almost everything. Still I'll offer what I do know in hopes it will help someone somewhere fill in some blanks. In return I hope you'll fill in a few of mine.

AP Newsfeatures' Scorchy Smith surely must deserve a prize for the greatest number of artists to draw one adventure strip. We're all familiar with its early days. In 1930 John Terry started the feature, modeling its hero after Charles Lindbergh. We have seen examples of Terry's scratchy, rather clumsy artwork (So unpopular was Terry's version that most online sources actually ran Noel Sickles' art, not Terry's).

We also know that Terry became ill and young Noel Sickles imitated the creator's style for a while until it became clear Terry wouldn't return. Then Sickles began changing to his own personal style. In the process he revolutionized comics. Sickles left Scorchy in 1938 when AP refused him a raise. For a while he assisted on other people's strips, but finally Sickles moved on to a distinguished illustration career.

Bert Christman replaced Sickles. Thanks to the people at Big Fun Comics we can see a long run of Christman's work. He was an able successor. Not only did he draw exceptionally well, he also (in my opinion) wrote better stories. Christman might have become a big name had he not joined the Flying Tigers and died in combat.

This part of Scorchy's history is well-documented. Afterward things get fuzzy. An article in Il Fumetto by Franco Fossati says Christman was succeeded by one Howell Dodd. The only Howell Dodd I turned up was a prolific magazine illustrator who painted lots of “men's sweat” illustrations in the 1950's. From his career dates he could have worked on Scorchy. I found a 1946 pen-and-ink drawing by Dodd that suggests he would have done a nice job. However I can find no further info.

Next in line (1939) was Frank Robbins, another young man who made his name on the strip. Though his approach was cartoonier than Christman's, Robbins' rich blacks and dynamic staging worked well on Scorchy. Sometime during Robbins' five years' stay on the feature a Sunday page began. Impressed by this young artist, King Features stole Robbins away from the AP in 1944. At King Robbins created another flyboy, Johnny Hazard.

Robbins was replaced by Ed Good. Good was a Canadian comic artist who later did much work in American newspaper strips and comic books. I've never seen a sample of his Scorchy.

According to the Who's Who of American Comic Books, Good drew Scorchy through 1950. Fossati cuts him off in 1946, which seems a likelier date. His replacement was Rodlow Willard, one of the most painful adventure strip artists I've encountered. Here's a sample from an Italian translation of one of his continuities. The sequence begins on 14 January, but no year is given. It's amazing that Willard ran the feature for eight years, considering that as time passed he only got worse.

Willard was succeeded by John Milt Morris. Morris seems to have taken over circa 1954. I haven't seen a sample of his Scorchy, either. However the one sample I've seen of Morris' strip work makes me wonder if Willard wasn't so bad after all! I've found no biographical information about Morris.

In almost every source, Scorchy's saga ends with Morris, crashing the strip ignominiously in 1961. Hardly anyone mentions the two artists who actually saw the strip out: George Tuska and A. C. Hollingsworth. I've seen several Tuska Scorchy dailies. They were drawn in Tuska's Buck Rogers style. This jibes with lambiek.net's note that Tuska was “main illustrator” on the strip from 1954 to 1959, when he left to take over Buck. Interestingly, lambiek.net says Tuska assisted on Scorchy back in 1939, which would have been in the early Robbins days.

Where this puts Morris, I don't know. It does suggest a term for A. C. Hollingsworth: 1959-1961. Hollingsworth, one of the few (two, perhaps?) African-American artists of 1950s American comics, is worth an entire article. Several of his Scorchy dailies and Sundays are available online. Though variable in quality, they're generally rather good. The last of the old-school Scorchy Smith style was gone by the time Hollingsworth took over; his work owed more to Wallace Wood than to Noel Sickles. It seems as if Scorchy became a space pilot in his last years. These Sundays take place on other planets. The day of the earthbound flyboy was over, as was the day of Scorchy Smith. It had been quite a ride.