Gene Colan, Frank Springer and other Marvel artists

As I’ve written before, Gene Colan is one of the artists who often seemed to struggle with the Marvel Method requiring him to do the lion’s share of the plotting. I’m sure his use of single-panel pages in the middle of the story was mostly to save work — one panel of action, no plotting — but it’s hard to object when I get images like this page from Sub-Mariner #11.Frank Springer was a much less accomplished artist and a poor choice to follow Jim Steranko on Nick Fury, Agents of SHIELD. Nevertheless, I love this splash page to #10, the second part of a Hate-Monger three-issue arc.Gary Friedrich’s story oddly refers to Nick and the Hate-Monger having clashed multiple times since WW II, rather than their one known encounter in Fantastic Four (I don’t know if anyone ever followed up on that). But I love that Friedrich writes Hate-Monger as a full-on white supremacist rather than “evil person who just happens to wear a swastika,” like the Silver Age Red Skull.
The following issue has another fun splash page by Springer.Showing again how the world at large shapes comics, this is an obvious attempt to mimic a psychedelic album cover. Psychedelic imagery is showing up elsewhere in comics, often when people (Nick Fury included a few issues earlier) get hit by gas attacks — sleeping gas would work just as well in these stories but it wouldn’t let the artist have fun. An image inside the story also borrows from pop culture — you may recognize it.

This issue is a late-1960s “youthquake” tale, as Hate-Monger plans to use his hate-tech to whip up the kids of the Baby Boom against the establishment, tearing America apart. It has some fun moments when Linda Brown (daughter of the original head of Hydra [presumably just a front for Baron Strucker], now a SHIELD agent) drags Nick to a disco to hear some hip music. It’s the kind of thing I always wanted to see them do with Captain America.

While I’m still not fond of Silver Surfer, I love John Buscema’s splash page for #5.The story is better than usual too. Black physicist Al Harper befriends the Surfer, seeing them as fellow outsiders in a hostile world (“Being black in America is like being an extraterrestrial trapped here.” is a problematic analogy, but the friendship still works). Harper figures out a gadget that will get the Surfer past Galactus’ barrier and back into space. The Silver Surfer postpones his departure when the Stranger attempts to wipe out our worthless species (as Buscema shows below)

Al Harper sacrifices himself heroically to destroy the null bomb. That worked for me on first reading, a little less now; a human non-super friend for Norrin Radd would have been a good addition to the series. The Stranger’s kvetching in that scene above doesn’t work for me at all. Seriously, dude? In a universe inhabited by Skrulls, Kree amd Badoon, you think Earth is the one world so vicious it needs to die?

As so often happens in comics, Stan completely forgets about Harper’s escape device — as far as I know, even though it’s intact at the story’s end, the Surfer never mentions it again. If I discover later in this Silver Age reread that I’m wrong, I’ll update with an apology.

I’ll wrap up with one scene from X-Men #55 (art by Werner Roth) I find amusing. It’s Part One of the last installment in a backup series detailing how the original members joined the team.

Up to this point, none of the stories worried that these events took place more than six years in the past. Roy Thomas changes that here, pointing out how long ago this was — before the Beatles! Before Streisand! Before Spidey! It doesn’t have any effect on the story; was Roy just getting into a nostalgic mood and indulging himself?

#SFWApro.