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Hangin' Out With Iron Man In The Late 60's And Early 70's....
Saturday, May 4, 2013, 04:00 PM
The one great certainty about the market is that things will always change. When we lose sight of that fact and dig in our heels on a particular viewpoint or thesis, it can create tremendous stress as we deal with an environment that may not appreciate our great insight.
Reverend Shark
It was way early inna 70's and my squeeze and I were in Santa Cruz checking out the U. We were walking the Boardwalk and just for S&G's
I bought a Marvel Captain America comic from the magazine rack, my first comic book in a decade and my first Marvel comic ever. I was blown away by the art. I was used to newspaper comic's little linear squares and here was something completely different. At that time in my life, I inhaled science fiction and fantasy at a prodigious rate, and the disconnect between the vistas in my imagination and the reality of then current film and TV was huge. Oh, you had yer Harryhausen and yer 2001, but the first was a few minutes of a two hour movie, and the second was an outlier. On TV, ya had yer Star Trek silver painted salt shaker medical tricorder and yer radio shack experimenter box with one switch and three lights, all shot inna studio with all the sweep and grandeur of a large closet.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9kmjW73-v4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8TABIFAN4o
The one comic book purchase led to a decade long run collecting comics and comix driven primarily by the art. One exception to that, was that I collected Iron Man books. I saw a huge potential to the title, but it was hardly ever even close to realized. The book seemed to get the second string if not the third string writers and artists. It drove me up the wall. Check out these covers, where Iron Man is in a unitard with lines on the boots, trunks and gloves, indicating segments. Not armor, not anything to Marvel over... A metallic suit with all the opportunities that reflections and detail allowed.... Not there. Nothing.
The one exception to this was when IM crossed over to a book with a first line artist in place. There he got a better treatment. Check out this page from an Avengers book, as drawn by Barry Smith, an incredible artist. Even in a book that starred as many as a dozen main characters, where the artist had to spread himself thin over all dozen, IM got a better treatment than in his own mag. There are pages to that book that I can't access that are even better...
IIRC, someone wrote to Marvel about this time asking about this issue, prolly inna Avengers book and over this story, and the letter caught my eye. The explanation was simple. IM was one of Marvel's better selling books, regardless of the resources allocated and almost independent of the quality. Why put a quality artist on it if it made no difference? Put them on another book where they would make a difference. IM always sold well. Not only that, but the book generated one of the largest monthly piles of letters and surprisingly, included one of the largest proportions of letters from females. There was clearly something at work beyond the book itself.
Finally 40 years later, IM is getting it's due on the big screen. Serious writing, serious graphics, an inspired actor, it all came together. I am not surprised. There was/is something beyond a comic book. It's nice to see.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSFjFGUZGIg
Incidentally, Marvel put the word out that they wanted nothing to do with Downey; too much prison time, bad rap for behavior on set, too many drug busts. He INSISTED on a screen test. This looks to be part of it...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxXgTLvL ... =endscreen
As an aside, here's Barry Windsor Smith's work on a Conan story. LOVE his Conan stuff. Click It And Dig It.
http://pragcap.com/10-classic-failed-tech-predictions
http://pragcap.com/theres-even-bigger-p ... f-thinking
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2013/05/st ... -disaster/
http://www.businessinsider.com/australi ... ing-2013-5
http://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-gun ... all-2013-5
http://www.businessinsider.com/to-save- ... -55-2013-5
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