Friday, September 1, 2006

It's Clobberin' Time!

A new Fantastic Four cartoon show is about to debut. I have no idea if it'll be any good but its press releases are a little screwy. Here's an excerpt from one of them...

The original 1967 animated action-adventure series, THE FANTASTIC FOUR, premiered on ABC with 19 half-hour episodes produced by Hanna-Barbera in association with Marvel Comics. The complex characters were conceived by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, who then enlisted the help of Hanna-Barbera to create a half-hour broadcast network series. It was faithful to the source, featuring plots and characters straight from the original comics series and complete with character designs from the late acclaimed artist Alex Toth.

Itemizing the bad phraseology may be unnecessary for readers of this site but just in case: The Fantastic Four property was indeed created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby...but it was created in 1961 with Kirby handling the character designs and no Hanna-Barbera involvement. Years later, a cartoon show was produced by H-B, which is when Mr. Toth's design work was done in '67 as he distilled the Kirby models down for animation purposes, not as part of the creation of the characters. Also, there were twenty episodes (not 19) produced.

I never know what to make of things like this. Even if they handed the job of writing the press release to someone who knew nothing about the comic book or its first animated version, you could find all this info with about two minutes of Googling. The show is financed by a French studio and produced over there so I'm guessing the problem is that the press release was authored in that language and then someone did a bad translation job. Makes you wonder if wars don't sometimes get fought because of mistakes of this sort.

• Posted at 9:26 AM · LINK

Happy Eight-Oh, Gene Colan!

Today is the eightieth birthday of one of the world's great comic artists, Gene Colan.

Gene is one of those guys who was so prolific in comics that we all took him for granted. I have the theory that if he'd only drawn a couple dozen stories in the sixties and then disappeared, fans would still be haunting the newsstands with glazed eyes, wondering aloud, "When is he coming back?" Instead, Gene just did good, solid work from when he got into the field (around 1944) until...gosh, he's still drawing the occasional story so I guess it's 62 years and counting.

For about the first ten years of that incredible career, his work was okay but unremarkable. Some time around '54 — I think it was on a Tuesday — he seems to have suddenly decided to stop drawing the way everyone else was drawing (in order to please editors) and to start drawing like himself (to please himself). That was when the Gene Colan we know and love was really born. By the late fifties, he had a style that was all his own...and one reason it was all his own was that most other artists didn't draw well enough to replicate it. He seized control of dark and light in his panels, working in and out of shadow and posing his people so that even when what they were saying or doing was a yawn, you were at least mesmerized by the way they were lit. Dull scripts — and he was handed hundreds — sparked to life and his people actually breathed, right there before your eyes on the cheaply-printed comic book page.

In the mid-sixties, he began applying all this to Marvel Super-Hero comics, becoming the first guy in the place to break significantly with the Jack Kirby template...yet he still managed to do what Jack did: Make everything he drew interesting. He worked on almost every franchise in the place but most notably on Iron Man, Sub-Mariner, Daredevil, Dr. Strange and (later and perhaps best), Tomb of Dracula. His delicate pencil work was inked by just about everyone who came within a block of the Marvel offices but most didn't understand the unique approach he was taking, working not in line and not in tone but in some middle ground of his own invention. I loved the work at the time but later, as I become more familiar with his pencil art, I came to realize how we only got 40%-60% of what he put into his pages. His best inkers — the Tom Palmers, the Frank Giacoias, etc. — managed to retain maybe 75%. Even Gene, on those rare occasions when they'd let him ink his own work, could only manage to keep 90%. He really was and is an incredible craftsman in graphite, and it's unfortunate that he did so much of his art at a time when comic book printing techniques were unworthy of him.

I've been fortunate to work with Gene on one or two occasions and would drop everything to do it again. Stan Lee wasn't kidding when he dubbed the guy "Gentleman Gene" because Colan truly is a gentleman, along with being a gentle man. He was never loud. He was never flashy. Those who worked with him rarely heard him complain. He just hunkered down and drew comics about as well as they can be drawn.

If you're a fan, drop by The Official Gene Colan Website. There, you can read a bio and interviews and see many examples of Gene at his best. You can also see the wonderful sketches he's now doing and if you're smart, order one...and there's also an e-mail link there if you'd like to drop Gene a note and wish him a happy birthday. Or even eighty more.

• Posted at 12:27 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

I always loved these expensive promos that networks used to do to "sell" you on their new fall season. The idea always seemed to be to embed the notion — which I doubt any sentient human being ever bought — that there was something so wonderful and hip and crowd-pleasing about their schedule that you should just leave your dial tuned to their station all year. I'm sorry they so rarely make these spots these days. You always got a catchy jingle — to the point where many of them would reverberate in your skull, long after the shows they were trying to sell had been cancelled. And as in this one, you often got the spectacle of the season's stars participating, smiling like they really want to be a part of it all. Here's what ABC did in 1978 along those lines.

• Posted at 12:17 AM · LINK