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Post by Hoosier X on Dec 6, 2021 19:39:53 GMT -5
Hoosier X, I found and read Lois Lane # 106 online. I enjoyed it. Nice art by Werner Roth and Vince Colletta ! Did you notice? The Superman figures are drawn by Roth and inked by Colletta. Kirby had just started at DC and ... all of a sudden! ... Superman has to look “the same” in every drawing in the Jimmy Olsen series. (Which seems to mean “like any of four or five different artists.”) And then when the Fourth World characters start popping up in Lois Lane, only THEN is it necessary for Anderson to start redrawing Superman’s face in the Lois Lane series. (But not Lois for some reason.) |
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Post by Icctrombone on Dec 6, 2021 20:44:37 GMT -5
There might be something to the theory that DC wanted to put Kirby in his place. So dumb, why did they hire him ?
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Post by Hoosier X on Dec 6, 2021 20:55:26 GMT -5
I wish I had a few more of these Roth issues of Lois Lane so I could see when they had other artists redraw Superman.
But they didn’t do it in #106.
I think my next issue is #111 and that has some redrawn faces.
#110 is going to show up in a few days.
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Post by Hoosier X on Dec 6, 2021 20:58:00 GMT -5
I’ve been looking online at Kirby’s Superman pencils before they were inked or altered and it boggles my mind that anybody is trying to say they weren’t good enough for Superman.
No wonder Infantino got defensive and kept changing his story.
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Dec 7, 2021 9:24:24 GMT -5
Toward the end of the meeting, I mentioned my grudge against Paul Kupperberg for insulting in print a fellow NASA engineer who dared to trash the 1992 ARION THE IMMORTAL miniseries:  I am surprised that such an unprofessional reply to a reader could have been published. Talk about having a chip on one's shoulder! When a reader complains about a story, even in an abrasive way, it seems to me that the options are (a) discussing the points brought up and explain the artistic choices made, (b) go the "can't please everyone all of the time" route, or (c) not publish the letter at all and yell, scream and curse to one's heart's content in the privacy of one's own office. Besmirching a reader on the LOC invites a response like "when one charges $1.50 for toilet paper, one does not make jokes about $200 toilet seats". |
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Post by Hoosier X on Dec 7, 2021 22:18:14 GMT -5
I wish I had a few more issues of Lois Lane so I could figure out exactly when the policy of redrawing every Superman face was put into effect. Here are my findings from a preliminary examination:
Lois Lane #106 - There is no sign of any tampering with the Superman figures drawn by Werner Roth and Vince Colletta. This came out the month after Jimmy Olsen #133 and the month before #134.
I just got #110 in the mail today. This is the one where Lois adopts a Native American baby. It looks to me like Murphy Anderson is redrawing the Superman faces, but he is treading lightly. That’s mostly because Superman isn’t in it that much and the faces are very small. I’m not sure I would have noticed if I wasn’t looking for it. Contrast this with the in-your-face tampering in the Jimmy Olsen issues or The Forever People.
I have a few issues from #111 to #118, but the next one I checked was #119. Again, Anderson is redrawing the Superman faces. This came out the same month as Jimmy Olsen #146, Forever People #7 and New Gods #7. Kirby would only be drawing Jimmy Olsen for two more issues.
And then I have a gap in my Lois Lane collection. My next issue is #132. It’s a year and a half later. Werner Roth is gone. An artist named John Rosenberger has taken over for Roth. Colletta is still the inker. I see no sign of anybody tampering with the Superman faces. Mister Miracle #14 came out the previous month. Kamandi #7 and The Demon #10 are both on the stands. The Forever People and The New Gods were canceled a few months previously.
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Post by Rob Allen on Dec 8, 2021 13:29:08 GMT -5
Anderson's availability might have been a factor - isn't this the era when he took over PS magazine from Will Eisner? That's what ended the Swanderson team.
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Post by Rob Allen on Dec 8, 2021 13:40:10 GMT -5
Also - we MUST have a Zoom meeting this Sunday. Unless something derails the plan, I'm going to be in Tacoma with Cei-U!. Hopefully we can get his new system set up, but even if that doesn't happen, I'll have this laptop with me. If George can't start the meeting, I'll start one. It'd probably be limited to 40 minutes, but the last time I did one, Zoom extended it for free.
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Post by Hoosier X on Dec 8, 2021 20:07:57 GMT -5
Anderson's availability might have been a factor - isn't this the era when he took over PS magazine from Will Eisner? That's what ended the Swanderson team. If it was so important to make sure Superman was standardized to look like any of several approved artists, they should have got Swan or Dick Dillin to redraw the faces in the Lois series. Or Al Plastino, who re-drew the faces in the earliest Jimmy Olsen comics. Infantino himself said it was necessary to protect the Superman trademark ... until suddenly it wasn’t. (Admittedly, this was only one of several different justifications that Infantino trotted out over time.) Re-drawing the faces was probably a big pain in the butt. Infantino even admits this ... for what that’s worth. It sort of looks like it suddenly wasn’t really very important as soon as Kirby wasn’t drawing Superman anymore. |
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Post by Prince Hal on Dec 8, 2021 20:43:42 GMT -5
Well, maybe not Dillin, who drew every character with a rectangular slab of a face.  Dillin's pencils were softened and his figures given fluidity, and faces given some individuality when he was inked by Sid Greene,
but he generally got either Frank McLaughlin, whose sharp, scratchy look did Dillin no favors. Neither did Giordano. Some styles just don't mesh.
And I'm not a Dillin hater or anything. I enjoyed his Blackhawk stories, virtually all inked (literally) by old pro Chuck Cuidera.
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Post by Hoosier X on Dec 8, 2021 21:34:34 GMT -5
Dillin was drawing World’s Finest during much of the time that Kirby was at DC in the 1970s. This was the period when World’s Finest was a Superman team-up book. From what I’ve heard, Dillin appears to have been an approved Superman artist so there wasn’t anybody re-drawing the faces so they didn’t resemble the surrounding art. But I haven’t had the chance to check on it myself. I have a couple of these issues but I’m not sure where they are.
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Post by Farrar on Dec 8, 2021 22:08:49 GMT -5
Fwiw Plastino has said that he and other Superman artists were asked to mimic Wayne Boring's Superman during the time Boring was the main Superman artist. When Swan replaced Boring as the main Superman artist, then Swan's version became the preferred Superman. In the 1960s Swan often redid Superman's faces in other Weisinger books, including the Lois Lane comic at first, until Weisinger became satisfied with Schaffenberger's Superman. But for the all-important covers Weisinger still had Swan redo the Superman faces at times. As an example, take a close look at the cover of the 80 Page Giant Magazine #14 I posted recently in the Cover Contest; Superman's face was redrawn by the Swan-Klein team. I'm just restating the obvious, but back then it was important to keep Superman on model since the target audience were kids (and not, as developed later on, older teens to adults who would keep reading comics for decades. Older readers wouldn't get confused when a character was drawn with a change in the way they parted their hair). Btw in Superman and Action Comics stories, when Schaffenberger was available, Weisinger would have him redraw the Lois and Lana faces. As for Infantino, he was part of DC's old guard like Weisinger so he too may have been a proponent of the "keep the character on model" mindset. But keep in mind that when Infantino was starting out as an artist, he (and his brother) worked at various times for Simon& Kirby's companies...so Infantino and Kirby were old friends. Maybe Infantino was being pressured by the suits at DC (who still wanted to keep their prime commodity Superman looking as he had for decades), but I doubt Infantino himself was trying to screw or embarrass Kirby. |
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Post by Prince Hal on Dec 8, 2021 22:21:02 GMT -5
Dillin was drawing World’s Finest during much of the time that Kirby was at DC in the 1970s. This was the period when World’s Finest was a Superman team-up book. From what I’ve heard, Dillin appears to have been an approved Superman artist so there wasn’t anybody re-drawing the faces so they didn’t resemble the surrounding art. But I haven’t had the chance to check on it myself. I have a couple of these issues but I’m not sure where they are. No, and I'm surprised he was an approved artist. Makes me more convinced that were just pulling Jack Kirby's chain.
All those team-up issues were inked by Joe Giella, another inker whose style didn't complement Dillin's. I'm guessing that pairing was not made for aesthetic reasons, because the Brave and the Bold-style team-up issues were edited by Schwartz, who inherited the book from Weisinger.
When that ended and it went back to Superman and Batman, Murray Boltinoff took over and bought in a few different inkers at first, including Murphy Anderson, who made Dillin's work shine, but for whatever reasons, it was Tex Blaisdell who soon took over for a long time, a guy whose work looked as bland and scratchy as McLaughlin's.
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Post by Hoosier X on Dec 8, 2021 22:46:52 GMT -5
Just because Infantino worked for Simon and Kirby doesn’t mean they were old friends. What’s the source that says they were old friends?
A lot happened between 1950 and 1970. And you can’t read interviews with Infantino without noticing that he had a big ego. You also can’t help but notice that his story keeps changing. He said that he ordered the faces to be redrawn after sales plummeted on issues where Kirby drew Superman’s face, so Infantino has no choice but to bring in Plastino and Anderson. And the sales went back up and Infantino was vindicated.
This didn’t happen.
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Post by Hoosier X on Dec 8, 2021 22:50:09 GMT -5
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