ITEM! Welcome to Iron Man Week here at Everything’s Sunny in Soapbox-Land! As we all count down to Shellhead’s sizzling cinematic debut, your Uncle Stanley is gonna hit yah with more invincible insider insights that you can shake a transisitor-powered suit of steel mesh at! All that, and sentences that end in prepositions too! Who could ask for more?
For starters, the Smilin’ One isn’t ashamed to admit that it took nominal nudges from both Irving Forbush and Mark Evanier to remind me that seminal Shellhead artist extraordinaire Georgous George Tuska turned 92 yesterday! 92! That’s older than Yours Truly, pilgrims, and I remember when milk still came in glass bottles and drinking water came from a faucet. Georgey-Boy’s been around so long he was born the year BEFORE Jolly Jack Kirby!
George was a Golden-Age vet from the earliest days of the comic book biz. Most of you probably remember the Tusk from his incredible 10-year run on The Invincible Iron Man (most of Iron Man's #5 through #108 - Compleatist Stan). But George started out assisting on the syndicated AP strip Scorchy Smith and later worked in that frantic finishing school for future famous fine artists, the Eisner & Iger shop. The House of Ideas managed to snag him back into the fold in 1964, at which point I was so thrilled to have someone to draw books besides Kirby, Ditko and Heck that I featured his return on the splash page of his first story (Tales of the Watcher, Tales of Suspense #58 - Even-More Compleatist Stan)! Heck, gettin’ Gorgeous George in the bullpen let me cut Jack back to under 100 pages-a-month!
Then George went on to work for the Distinguished Corporation and had a fabulous 15-year run drawing their daily Superman syndicated strip (...should I mention that everyone's favorite whipping-boy, Vince Colletta, inked most of this 1978-1993 run? - Ridiculously Compleat Stan), finally retiring from full-time comics work, though he continues to do commissioned work to this very day! I hope I’m still that active when I’m his age... mainly because that’s only seven years from now and I have contracts going out over the next 20 years! So Happy Birthday, George, and keep on truckin’! We youngsters will keep tryin' to follow your exemplary example!
Excelsior!
Smiley
2 comments:
Stan, you're running a bit low on the St. John's Wort -- the word is "completist".
...And yet, maybe I speak too soon! If the construction "compleat" is common in English, it's undoubtedly because of Izaak Walton's Compleat Angler, after all, whose subtitle is "The Contemplative Man's Recreation"...in other words, a stand-in for memory, that activity in which we smooth over other's faults as well as our own in lingering fondness. Aha, like this blog! So it's simply a sly self-reference, isn't it, Smiley? Of course! Because who, 'pon reading your pulse-pounding paeans and panegyrics to the peerless pencillers and pen-and-ink practitioners of the past, can't perceive the prescription of Piscator that's packed into 'em:
"use him as though you loved him, that is, harm him as little as you may possibly, that he may live the longer"
So, shame on me for doubting your slipperiness, O Solipsistic One! Truly you are the Prince of Pareidolia! And, what a terrific thesis this will make for my next tumultuous term paper!
Signed,
Upstate New York College Student
This just goes to prove what I've always said — Marvelites are an educational cut above the IQ-starved pack. Did you gargle with an encyclopedia first thing this morning, Plok? When you get that term paper done, please send your Uncle Stanley a copy... just make sure it's the Cliff Notes version! Otherwise I'll have no idea what you're saying!
Smiley
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