WELL HERE'S YOUR BASIC TROUBLE RIGHT HERE...

VINCE COLLETTA, THE MUSICAL

ITEM! And speaking of musicals, wouldn't the Merry Marvel Bullpen of the 60s make a great cast of crooning comic characters for stage or screen? If only Yours Truly had the time to write every great idea that flowed from my Gershwin-like ganglia! Maybe if I get the ball rolling, other talents approaching mine (admittedly, few though they may be in number) can pick up the call and run with it. Here's a little ditty I wrote about our favorite Sicilian Scribbler, the late-great Vince Colletta. The lyrics should be sung to the tune of "The Oldest Established" from Guys & Dolls. Enjoy!

Excelsior!

Smiley 

JACK'S BACK — AND WE GOT HIM!

ITEM! That’s right, pilgrims! Jolly Jack Kirby is back from the Great Beyond, and someday soon we may all see new art and stories from the King. At least that’s the story according to the late, lamented Weekly World News (April 16, 1996 issue). Many thanks to MMMS member-in-good-standing J. Sitwell for sending this in, which originally appeared in John “There’s Always To” Morrow’s always excellent Jack Kirby Collector (ish #13, Dec. 1996, or The Collected Jack Kirby Collector Vol. 3). Click on the image at right to embiggen it for your reading pleasure.

By my calculations, the subject of the story, 10-year-old Roger Falmaton, should be about 22 these days. It’s probably just a matter of time before he pops up at the Marvel offices with a portfolio full of even-Newer Gods or more Fantastic Fours ready to be unleashed upon an unsuspecting public! The mind boggles at the possibilities! Let’s all just hope that Vince Colletta’s ghost isn’t out there somewhere teaching some poor kid how to erase penciled backgrounds!

It’s also given your Uncle Stanley a great idea. While I’m still walking around in the mortal world, I really should be auctioning off the haunting rights to my nearly-departed ghost so that the next Stan Lee can have a helping hand writing the swingingest soliloquies and creating the craziest comic characters conceptually possible in the next century! Kind of like the Ghost and Mrs. Muir only with a typewriter instead of a telescope. The floor is officially open, True Believers! I’m now accepting any and all bids to see who I’ll be haunting in the next life! The ebays probably has some kind of bizarre policy against this sort of thing, but I’ll figure something out. Avi Arad... no need for you to bid. I plan on haunting you for free anyway! 

Excelsior!

Smiley

MARVELOUS MOTIVATIONAL MONOGRAPHS

ITEM! Honest Irv just showed me this great website called motivationalbuck.com and I decided to spruce up the ol’ POW! offices with some customized creative content today! It was either that, or start writing some of the two-dozen projects that my lawyers have signed me up for. Heck, I'm all writer-blocked on the sequel to Election Daze anyways... maybe I need to do a book of these instead! It just goes to show you — you never know when the Merry Marvel Muses are gonna strike next! You Frantic Ones and Fearless Front-Facers out there in Marveldom should really go to this site and have some fun with it. Your Uncle Stan sure did!

Excelsior!

Smiley

FOR ONCE WORDS ACTUALLY FAIL ME

ITEM! This painting is so wrong on so many levels that words actually fail me. Just kidding, pilgrims! I suppose it could be worse... at least Vince Colletta didn’t ink it. Actually, Vinnie probably woulda done a nicer job, and he'd have included Gwen and Mary Jane done in his romantic babe style. Brandon Bird, consider yourself demoted in rank to R.F.O. (Real Frantic One). Your Sergeant Stanley was tempted to bust you all the way back to B.E.B. (Brand Echh Booster), but that would be cruel and unusual punishment. And speaking of cruel and unusual punishment, click here to see a larger version of this painting. (Not recommended for anyone who is pregnant, diabetic, or under the age of 85. Repeated viewing has been shown to cause seizures in laboratory animals. Pillow fights lasting over four hours are not normal, and you may need to see a doctor.) 'Nuff Said!

Excelsior!

Smiley

MARVEL'S SWINGIN' PLASTIC PILLOWS

ITEM! Remember these, True Believers? Me neither. Let’s face it... your Uncle Stan’s long-term memory works slightly better than a shot-gunned sieve. But be that as it may, look-see what I found this morning while rummaging around down in my climate-controlled vault at Casa del Lee... a Merry Marvel Marching Society plastic pillow! And they only went for a measly $1.50 way back in 1968. That was about three gallons worth of gas at the time... so in today’s dollars they would only cost about $12-15 buckeroos. What a bargain!

You know we sometimes give the late, great Vinnie Colletta a hard time around these here parts, but you have to give it up to The Prince! I mean do you have any idea how hard it is to ink an inflatable plastic pillow? It takes a mighty light touch, sunshine. Enjoy the "this-offer-clearly-expired 40 years ago" ad below!

Excelsior!

Smiley

A BLAZING POWER, THAT'S IRON MAN

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

YOU CAN GLORIFY OR VILIFY HIM...

ITEM! Wouldja believe that the ol‘ Sock It To Stan emailbox has been brimming over with hundreds of delirious demands for more info on everyone’s favorite Silver-Haired Silver-Age inker Vince Colletta? Would you believe dozens? Okay, how ‘bout three? One? Anyway, in response to requests too numerous to enumerate...

This time ‘round your Uncle Stanley’s not going to talk about Vinnie’s Sicilian sensibilities, silk suits, or systematic style of simplifying shortcuts with a single sable stroke. The Smilin’ One is going to put his old art director shoes back on and talk about the artist by talking about the art. As Marc Anthony said, “I come to critique Vinnie, not to bury him.”

First and foremost, the Vin-Man was an accomplished artist par excellence in his own right. Sometimes that point gets glossed over. Vinnie penciled and inked about a zillion mystery and romance mags for Merry Marvel way back when we were only Almost-Above-Average Atlas. In fact, Vin’s best inks were on his own pencils, which may make sense but is not universally true of all comic book artists. His penciling and inking both featured delicate feathering and atmospheric cross-hatching that really set the mood in some of those mystery yarns. In the romance books, he lightened his touch into something closer to his later Marvel work... and his women! Vinnie could always draw a pretty face.

I think that the main source of any dissatisfaction with Vinnie’s inks on Kirby and later super-hero artists has to do with conflicting styles. In a time and an age when the sum total of my art direction to most folks was to “draw it like Kirby,” everyone was focused on giving me bold lines, lots of weighted blacks, complex machinery, and the ever lovable Kirby Krackle. None of this played particularly well to Vinnie’s strengths. In many ways, Vinnie’s style and artistic sensibilities were practically the opposite of Jolly Jack’s. Where Jack would lay down a bold squiggle to indicate not just a reflective surface but also for sinew and musculature, Vin would interpret that same shape as a feathered surface texture. And that right there is the magic, pilgrims! Because sometimes in art as well as in comics, diametrically opposing styles can become quite complimentary and actually enhance the effect of each separate sensibility into a synergistic whole. Like Lennon and McCartney, Fred and Ginger, the Skipper and Gillgan... not to mention (plotting-wise) Lee and Kirby! I think that’s exactly what happened in the very best of the Kirby-Colletta Thor run that made so many fans love that work. Sometimes the synaptic synergy was there and sometimes it wasn’t. For example, what worked wonderfully well on Thor didn’t work out as well on the Fantastic Four.

That all said, Vince the Prince’s inking style also suffered from being rendered in a way that made mechanical reproduction (especially in those days) difficult at best. The original art was beautiful, but the cameras and presses at the time (and some since) just couldn’t deal with all of the decidedly delicate lines. And even some of that was caused by Vinnie’s stubborn refusal to do it any other way besides Sinatra-Style —“His Way”. For examples of having your cross-hatched cake and reproducing it too, see Steven Bissette and John Totleben’s rollicking run on Brand Echh’s Saga of the Swamp Thing book. Or anything by Bodacious Berni Wrightson.

And here’s the very last thing that your Uncle Stanley has to say on the subject. While I’m presciently positive that this debate will rage on for billions of blogs to come, here’s one thing to consider when it comes to creative critiques — if you’re an artist, can you do the job any better? Irving Forbush put me onto this site where’s that’s the challenge! Think you can ink a Jolly Jack Thor page better than Vince Colletta? Then prove it. The riotous results speak for themselves... most of us can't. Your Uncle Stan certainly can’t! I’m doing good just to get up first thing in the morning and find my thesaurus.

Excelsior!

Smiley

AND A BLIND MAN SHALL INK THEM

ITEM! Time to answer some Sock It To Stan emailage from the ol’ Intrawebs. Danny McFanny writes:

"I think Vince Colletta was probably the single greatest inker ever to grace Jack Kirby’s pencils, especially on classic issues of Journey Into Mystery/Thor. But everyone else seems to think he’s the next thing to Al Capone with an ink brush, and spend all of their waking hours bashing on a man no longer here to defend himself. What do you think, Stan?"

That’s quite a complicated question, Danster, but I won’t let that stop me from takin’ an ever lovin’ swing at it. It’s hard to talk about Vince “Crow Quill” Colletta without stirring up some kind of fuss, flak or fracas. Comic collectors, co-workers and even cannoli-consumers have always been clearly cleft on what to make of the Sicilian Scribbler. They either loved him or they hated him.

Yours Truly? I was always a little scared of him, to tell you the truth. Vinnie and I were both in the family-oriented comics biz, but he had relations in another family business, if you catch my drift. But I have to say that back before the Marvel Age of Comics, when the only rates that Uncle Marty would let me pay inkers was somewhere north of Charlton and south of movie matinee admissions, Vinnie was one of our ever-reliable go-to inkers, alongside Darling Dick Ayers, George (Bell) Roussos, and Frank (Ray) Giacoia. He was cheap, dependable and fast. Before Mighty Marvel became Might Marvel, that was an uncontestable combination. Heck, I couldn’t not hire him.

That said... there were always issues with Vin. He was an issue creator by nature (no pun intended). Even as early as 1965 we got fan mail complaining about his inking in a time and an age when no-one complained about inkers. The fans were too busy busting me and Jack for giving the Hulk only three toes or forgetting Bruce Banner’s first name (clue: it’s NOT “Bob”). While most readers seemed to like Vinnie’s inks on Thor, they hated ‘em on the FF. And then one day Marvelous Marie Severin showed me some Thor pages and pointed out where Vinnie was erasing whole figures and backgrounds from Jack’s pencils to simplify the inking. I’d actually art directed Vinnie to soften up Jack’s faces, especially on the winsome women-folk (Joe Sinnott got the same directions), but never to erase whole figures or simplify Jack’s iconic cityscapes into architech-school-dropout-drawings. Did an inker doing those sorts of things constitute a crime? Of course not. In the rush to get the books out the door, most of us didn’t even notice. Jack himself never noticed while he was doing Thor and the FF. Was it poor decision-making on Vinnie’s part? Of course it was.

What Jolly Jack did finally notice was when Vinnie paraded his DC Fourth World pencils around the Marvel Offices. There was a lot of bad blood still going on back then, and apparently for Jack that was the last strenuous straw. Then he finally recognized the shortcuts and liberties that Vinnie was taking with the pencils he toiled over morning noon and night, and the rest you know. Both your Uncle Stan and his successors continued to use Vinnie as an inker until the end of the Jim Shooter era, when Vin’s judgement was once again a little, shall we say, on the lacking side. See this to get a taste of what I mean.

The real crime was that Vince Colletta was an excellent artist when he decided to be, including penciling, inking and even painting (no lie!). He just didn’t decide to be most of the time, and often used his meager pay as a rationale for his lesser efforts. In that sense, he was the Anti-Kirby, because Jack threw his whole heart and soul into almost every pencil line he drew, regardless of recompense or recognition. Vincent Colletta, not so much. Gentlemen, fire up your comments!

Excelsior!

Smiley