Celebrating the Unpopular Arts
 

Roy Thomas speaks! Mar-Vell listens!

Over at Roy Thomas’s website he has several pages listing his comic book co-creations. As I’ve been blogging so much about Captain Mar-Vell, this section I stumbled across seemed interesting:

First, the good Captain’s debut in Marvel Super-Heroes #12 (1967)

“When Stan Lee worked up the first story of Marvel’s first Captain Marvel in 1967, at publisher Martin Goodman’s direction, he left the character to artist Gene Colan to design. Gene did a basically good job on an outfit that was half super-hero costume, half space-suit… but it was lacking something, I told Stan: a chest symbol. He told me to give him one, so I drew (I think on one of Gene’s penciled drawings) a Saturn-like ringed planet that would be the home world of the Kree. If I’d left things there, with that chest symbol and then taking over the scripting with the second story, it would’ve been all well and good. But for some reason, I also gave Stan two (or perhaps three) suggested color schemes for the costume–I don’t think he’d asked me to, I just did it. One or more were composed of primary colors (red, yellow, blue, as I recall)… but for some reason I also turned in one that was white and green, based I think on memories of seeing stories of the DC hero the Spectre… and memories of SUPERMAN b&w ad that I had colored that way as a kid. For some obscure reason, Stan liked the green and white version and used it… and I’ve hated myself ever since for suggesting those colors. To me, he looks like he’s wearing white longjohns. When I worked with Gil Kane to redesign his costume in 1969, I made sure we had primary colors that time.”

Then there’s the origin of Mar-Vell’s later and much more familiar costume, introduced in Captain Marvel #16 (1969):

“On the morning at home that I came up with the idea for revamping Mar-Vell as a science-fictional “answer” to the Big Red Cheese and got Stan by phone to approve both the idea and my taking over the strip from Archie Goodwin, I almost immediately made a drawing of the character’s new look. Basically, it was a tracing or re-rendering of Jerry Robinson’s cover figure for his 1946 ATOMAN comic, a look I’d always loved. What I came up with wasn’t exactly the same costume… certainly not in the color scheme… not sure if I kept the cape or not, etc…. but kept the general look, mask, and the sunburst-type chest symbol. That was all set to be the look until, a couple of days later, before Don Heck had even drawn the new costume that was to be introduced in his and Archie’s final issue, Gil Kane waltzed into Stan by sheer coincidence and told him he’d really like to become the artist of Marvel’s CAPTAIN MARVEL and see if the character could be salvaged.

Stan told him that I (whom he barely knew) was in the process of revamping the character, but that he was sure I’d love to have him join the team as artist. (I presume at that time the plan was for Don Heck to stay on as artist.) Being a big Kane fan–far bigger than Stan was, certainly–I was happy with the idea, and all materials for the first post-Heck issue were turned over to Gil to draw. Somewhere along the line, I recall that he and I sat down with my sketch and Gil showed me the ways he’d like to alter the look still further. I remember going all with most if not all of his suggestions, since the important thing to me was a new look to go along with the new storyline, and Gil’s amended visual version worked at least as well as what I’d envisioned. He then went off and drew the story, with some help from his young assistant Roger Brand in breaking the story down… and both he and Roger sent me word a bit later, separately, how much they had liked the new concept. Gil’s and my friendship and closeness dated from that time…and the original art for the splash page from that first Kane CAPTAIN MARVEL issues hangs in the foyer of our house. Our five issues did quite well, brought the book back from the brink of oblivion… even if, after those few issues, we had to turn the book over to other hands.”

Given the book took a six-month pause after #19, appeared twice in 1970 and then vanished until 1972,  it obviously didn’t step very far back from the brink of oblivion. Still, it was enough to keep the book around until Jim Starlin got his hands on it so it all worked out.

Art by Gene Colan (top), Don Heck and Gil Kane (x2)

 

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