Looking back over his career, Kubert hit a high level of professionalism very early on and never faltered. Joe Kubert is gone now, but he has left thousands of beautifully illustrated pages of comic art as his legacy.
As for the Zebra...I understand the striped shirt, but the pair of skin tight swim trunks and bare legs I guarantee would not make it through a winter. I mention it because I don’t remember any blizzards in superhero comics, leaving the characters able to walk around dressed like it’s a warm, sunny day at the beach, and because a large winter storm is knocking on my door as I write this. When I go out in a few hours with shovel in hand to clear sidewalks and driveway, I will be bundled up like an Antarctic explorer, yet still thinking that in the never-never land of comic books the heroes never seem bothered by weather.
From Green Hornet Comics #20 (1944):
The place to find superheroes in blizzards is in the intersection with westerns. There are lots of blizzards in westerns, and a few superheroes. The earliest superhero-in-a-blizzard story of which I'm aware is “Bandits in the Blizzard” with the White Rider and Superhorse, beginning on what Comic Book Plus calls page 37 of Blue Bolt v1 #9 (for Feb '41). That said, I do not think that I have ever seen a superhero outside of a western confront a blizzard (setting aside villains whose names contain “Blizzard”), but I do recall a story in which Bruce Wayne, not guised as the Batman, had to deal with killer in some very wintry wilderness environment.
ReplyDeleteIt's quite remarkable that the authorities were sufficiently convinced that th' Zeeb was a murderer to indict him for murder, yet did not unmask him.
I still want to see an article by someone more knowledgeable than I, exhibiting and explaining the stylistic similarities to be found in the work of Kirby, Robinson, Meskin, Kubert, and Ditko at some stages in their careers. There are many instances in which the work of one of them might be mistaken as that of one of the others.
Daniel, not only can those artists be confused with one another in their early years, but they may have been assisted in a job by another artist or artists, depending on deadlines, etc., so art spotting gets even more confusing. When I see an artist's signature it doesn't necessarily mean they did 100% of what we as readers are looking at.
ReplyDeleteI have also seen some superhero stories set in storms, including the Batman story you mention, but I was trying to point out that costumes that include bare body parts may look great, but are damned inconvenient when the temperature drops below zero, or a blizzard is hitting the human body straight on.
(The coldest temperatures I have ever encountered were caused by wind chill: the coldest being an announced -50º on a mountaintop in Germany, when an artillery exercise had to be called off because of fear of cold-related injuries to the troops. All of us were wearing two of every article of clothing. Years later I saw the story of the Scott and Amundsen races to the South Pole, The Last Place on Earth on PBS...and I remembered that morning on that cold-ass mountain. Brrrr.)