Tuesday, September 2, 2008

GASPAR SALADINO — THE BETTERER LETTERER!

ITEM! As many of you Frantic Ones already know, we’re all about credit-where-credit-is-due here in Soapboxland. And in that spirit, today we are celebrating one of the greatest unsung heroes of comics from the Silver Age straight through to the 21st Century. That’s right, we’re talking about the indomitable Gaspar Saladino, Letterer Extraordinaire (try saying THAT three times fast)!

Gaspar’s Distinguished Career saw him mainly working for our competition throughout most of the 50s and 60s, but boy-oh-boy did he ever save our bacon in the swingin’ seventies and eighties! By then, Marvel stalwarts Artie Simek and Sam Rosen had retired and for whatever reason we couldn’t find a decent letterer to save our sales-starved souls. Then it hit me! Why not do the same thing with lettering that we did when we had Jolly Jack do breakdowns and layouts for some of our action-challenged Bullpen artists? So we brought in Gaspar the Great to re-design some of our liltin’ logos and and to letter just the covers and splash pages of most of our line of Mighty Marvel Comics. The results were spectacular, and if you were reading ‘em back then you were probably so dazzled by Gaspar's uncredited cover and splash page work that you didn’t even notice that the interior pages were lettered just a wee bit less elegantly.

And so, in celebration of the life and career of Gaspar Saladino, we here at the Soapbox present a sizzling selection of some of his best logo lettering work from the 70s (at least the best that he did for us, natch). Click on the images below to embiggen! To read much, much more comprehensive coverage of the Great Gaspar’s career, allow me to direct your kind attention to the titanic 12-part series dedicated to ol’ Gaspar over at Dial B For Blog! Tell Robby your Uncle Stan sent yah! Enjoy!






Excelsior!
Smiley

No comments: