Number 616
Buscema @ ACG
I don't need to tell anyone about John Buscema. I hope not, anyway. He was one of the best pencillers in the business for many years, drawing thousands of pages for Marvel Comics in the 1960s and '70s.
These are two superbly illustrated 1959 stories by John Buscema for ACG's Adventures Into the Unknown numbers 108 and 110.
Buscema died at age 74 in 2002.
3 comments:
These are just beautiful to look at. The ACG books that I have are mostly issues featuring Magicman and Nemesis.
I could literally write for hours on Big John's art in these two stories, about how he celebrates with loving detail the beauty of the ordinary face and physique, his ability to draw children who actually look like children, his remarkable talent for drawing horses in motion, and the manner in which he so easily expresses malevolence in the small alien faces of the first story.
Yes, Buscema put all this into the work in spite of how terrible the scripts were. They don't do a whole lot more than litter the art with obfuscatory and utterly unnecessary text -- John must have loved the way the editor (and letterer) covered up one of his magnificent horse faces on page Two, Panel Two of the "Pipes of Pan."
Thanks, Pap. This is a period in Big John's career poorly represented these days. Love seeing them.
My first exposure to Buscema came a couple of years before these stories, when he illustrated Helen of Troy, Dell Four Color 684 in 1956. Even at the age of 9 I thought that artwork was above average.
Unfortunately, getting some of the art covered up by speech balloons is a part of being a comic book artist.
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