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Editor's Note: The following piece is part of an expanded version of Pierre's article "The Four Fantastic Phases of Silver Age Marvel" which featured in the Sept 2000 issue of that excellent publication Comic Book Marketplace, also known as CBM. Without the constraints of the printed medium, we're able to present this fuller version. You might like to compare the two! - Nick
Author's Note: Regular visitors to this site will be familiar with the four phases of Silver Age Marvel's development described here, as they continue to serve as the theoretical basis of this writer's collaboration with Gregorio Montejo in our In-depth Reviews column. I first dreamed up the idea of dividing Silver Age Marvel's development into four phases in the early '90s, just before the completion of the original of this article around 1994. - Pierre
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Part IV: The Twilight Years
Although three distinct periods in the development of Silver Age Marvel have already been identified, the Early, Formative Years, the Years of Consolidation and the Grandiose Years, a fourth still remains: the Twilight Years. Characterized by a combination of a growing lethargy among the company's established titles and the rise of imaginative new features produced by young creators who'd been fans before they became professionals, the Twilight Years was the longest and most drawn out of the four phases. Those looking for a clear line of demarcation between the Grandiose Years and the Twilight Years however, will be disappointed. Like the previous phases, the change from one era to the next wasn't obvious, coming gradually, almost imperceptibly and unlike those earlier phases, the period of overlap between the Grandiose Years and the Twilight Years is a lengthy one. And despite the temptation to use Jack Kirby's departure from the company as marking the end of the Grandiose Years, the fact is, no era can be demarcated by a single event. In fact, it's the contention here that Marvel's exit from the Silver Age began almost two full years before Kirby left.
Begun in the triumphant glow of the Grandiose Years, this final era in Silver Age Marvel's development wound down slowly as the once vibrant dynamism of Lee, Kirby, Ditko and Heck became spent, the visual skills of their successors Romita, Buscema and Colan for a time held their ground and new writers like Roy Thomas, Gerry Conway and Doug Moench steered their most creative energies away from the books that had become the bedrock of the line. As the changeover from the old guard to the new was completed and the company entered fully into its final phase (a phase whose elements and style of storytelling became as different in their sensibilities from those of the three earlier phases as those phases had been different from comics produced before Marvel's revolution), the Twilight Years became a kind of epilogue to what had gone before as the long night of mediocrity slowly settled over the company.
Gradually, as the Twilight Years progressed, a kind of atrophy set in on the older titles that had once led the Marvel revolution. Elements such as characterization and realism began to fade and humor became stale; formula trumped originality. Ironically however, it was these very strips that continued to outsell the oddball books and new features that were showing the sometimes daring creativity that had originally set Marvel apart from its competitors. And so, as the Twilight Years faded out, and memory of the glorious triumphs of the earlier phases dimmed, an air of somnambulism crept into Marvel, only to be jarred into wakefulness when, at intervals, rising creative stars occasionally shook it from its slumber. The years would stretch into decades and reach beyond the scope of this work as flashes of creativity, the last echoes of Marvel's fabled Silver Age (such as that of John Byrne's stint on the X-Men and Fantastic Four, Frank Miller's work on Daredevil and the Roger Stern, John Buscema, Tom Palmer team up on the Avengers), became more and more infrequent until petering out completely. |
89) The Comics Code Authority may have been "considerably rumpled in spirit" after being tested by Lee's anti-drug stories and Thomas and Smith's Conan series, but that didn't mean it was about to roll over and play dead. Somerules may have been changed and restrictions weakened, but there were stillguidelines to be followed and more importantly, the unwritten spirit of the Code was as strong as ever. One of the rules that hadn't changed was that villains couldn't be shown as gaining by their ill deeds. Bad guys had to be punished either by simple defeat or being jailed. Another rule was that no one could be killed in a comic book, especially not by the heroes. And so, when the Green Goblin killed Gwen Stacy (it wasn't clear at the time that he did [and still isn't] but he was surely indirectly responsible), it was almost as shocking an event as Gwen's death itself. There could only be one punishment for a villain who committed such an act and it was visited upon the Goblin in Amazing Spider-Man # 122. The only thing was, he couldn't die at the hand of the hero and so, the story was written in such a way that the Goblin would perish by his own action when he directed his "Goblin glider," its forward end splintered into a sharpened fragment, toward Spider-Man. At the last moment, Spidey leaps aside and the deadly contraption impales the Goblin instead. But it wasn't the cathartic ending that Peter (and the readers) expected. "Somehow, I thought it would mean more," muses Spider-Man. "When a man dies…it should mean something. I thought seeing the Goblin die would make me feel better about Gwen. Instead, it just makes me feel empty…washed out…" Aside from its requisite action scenes, the story over issues 121 and 122 was well told with Conway's script still crisp and very much in Lee's style. Gathering all of his story elements together, from Harry Osborn's relapse into drug use to the return of Norman Osborn's memory to the shock of Robby Robertson's learning of Gwen's death, Conway helps build the story to its double set of shattering climaxes. Fortunately, Gil Kane's wild pencils were reined in by Romita's inks, making sure that the look of the strip remained somewhat true to the style Marvel's art director had established over the years. This was especially important for the book's supporting cast which carried much of the story's dramatic power. Onesuch scene between a grieving Peter and a usually frivolous Mary Jane brought the story to a close. "I heard about Gwen," Mary Jane tells Peter. "I'm really torn up…" "Don't make me laugh, Mary Jane," replies Peter, thinking of how it was Mary Jane's attitude that had driven Harry to drugs. "You wouldn't be sorry if your own mother died. Go on, get out of here. I know how you hate sick beds." Sobbing, Mary Jane is about to leave when suddenly, she changes her mind and wordlessly remains. It was a first step for the character away from the immaturity that had always defined her personality and a symbolic dividing line between the Lee/Ditko/Romita era and everything after. Nothing would be the same again.
90) By Kull the Conqueror # 9, the team of writer Gerry Conway, artist Marie Severin and inker John Severin were running like a well oiled machine. Script and art were both integrated in a perfect blend of storytelling expertise telling exciting (usually single issue) tales of intrigue and action that came to differentiate the Kull strip from that of Conan. When Marie joined brother John on the art in #2, the high quality of the feature was immediately established with little need for improvement and so it remained through a series of solid tales, some original and some adaptations from text stories by Kull creator Robert E. Howard. The title peaked however with this issue's story "The Scorpion God," based on the Howard tale "Swords of the Purple Kingdom," in which assassination, kidnap and betrayal figure prominently among a rich cast of characters that included Kull himself, his trusted friend Brule the Spearslayer, his counselor the elderly Tu, the scheming Dondal and the dashing Dalgar, the beautiful Nalissa and her strict father the Count Murom Bora Ballin, the would-be usurper Phondar of Gomlah and a host of traitorous generals who try to kill Kull in a thrilling, action-packed climax. But despite the excellence of the strip's first nine issues (as a group, some of the very best books produced in the twilight years), it had always been a troubled one. Canceled after the second issue, it was revived months later, but never warranted more frequency than bi-monthly. And more trouble lay ahead first when the strip lost the services of John Severin with #10 and then Conway and Marie herself with #11. After that, there was one attempt at jump-starting the book with a radical makeover that also failed to ignite reader interest and the title was canceled again soon after. For some reason, the readers who flocked to the Conan book never warmed to Kull but then, the Kull feature made more demands on a reader's attention with its more complex plots and scheming characters who always seemed to have more than a single line in the water. But the Kull book wouldn't be the only quality feature in the Twilight Years to suffer halting sales and final cancellation after only a relatively short run. Marvel's landscape in these years was filled with them and as the company's Silver Age receded further into the past, the only titles left standing would be the old standby flagship books and their myriad super-hero spin-offs. Although the Kull feature would be revived again in the next decade (with a couple of stunning covers by Barry Smith and some equally impressive work by English artist John Bolton), it would never again quite capture the claustrophobic atmosphere of the original series of a barbarian usurper king who discovers that power, far from freeing him, has made him instead a prisoner of fear, distrust and especially his own conscience. |
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91) Meanwhile, Ploog's fellow newcomer Craig Russell was coming along. After fits and starts in Marvel's anthology titles, Russell finally got the nod to take on a series of his own. It was his tough luck that the Ant-Man strip he'd been assigned to ended right here, in Marvel Feature # 10! To be fair however, it sure wasn't Russell's fault! Half-baked from the beginning, the strip would last only a merciful seven issues before being replaced by the FF's Thing in solo adventures. Saddled with the inappropriate pencils of Herb Trimpe (who'd been with the company since the late sixties but up until now, safely confined to the Hulk strip) and suffering beneath the weight of a leaden Mike Friedrich plot involving Ant-Man being caught at insect size and needing to survive the terrors of a suburban backyard, it was as if someone had deliberately tried to sabotage the strip! Continuing to forage for ideas for new features, Thomas must've given the green light for a new Ant-Man strip (after all, the character was one of the earliest dreamed up by Lee and Kirby way back in the early 1960s and the only one, except for the X-Men, without a regular berth) but whoever came up with the idea of getting him out of his traditional red fighting togs and into some kind of homemade outfit made a mistake. That and the plot of getting him lost in his own backyard made the character less of a hero than a poor schlep who spent almost the entire series on the defensive and constantly being forced to react against threats instead of actively searching them out. The nadir of the strip was reached when first the Wasp was transformed into a brainless combination of insect and human and then when the seven issue series was forced into using ten year old reprints to meet deadlines! And all this on a bi-monthly release schedule! Well, needless to say, even a not quite ready for primetime Russell was a step up for this mess. Coming in at # 7 (he got to draw some of the Avengers in # 9), Russell started carefully under the steadying hands of multiple inkers (mentor Dan Adkins and someone named Mark Kersey in # 7, Jimmy Janes and Jim Starlin in # 8, Frank Bolle in # 9 and Frank Chiaramonte this issue. Whew! But committees like this were becoming increasingly common at the hectic Marvel offices where things were rapidly getting out of editor Thomas' control) until gradually finding his sea-legs and putting in a pretty good job here. Even Friedrich managed to clean up his act and supply the new artist with a couple decent stories (the first, about a robot called the Para-Man, was kind of a poor man's retelling of the Hank Pym/Ultron relationship and the second involving Dr. Nemesis and his blackmail attempt to get Ant-Man to break into Avengers HQ to steal their "secrets"). Throughout, Russell's emerging style comes through, especially this issue with Ant-Man's fight with Nemesis. It was nothing to brag about, but Russell was definitely improving with more fill-in work next on the Morbius strip over in Adventure into Fear where he'd start using the comic page as a thematic whole while at the same time, further refining his style into one that was definitely his own.
92) Another one of those serendipitous partnerships that seemed to be coming
together at Marvel nearly every month in these years was that of writer Don McGregor and artist Rich Buckler on the Black Panther feature that began in Jungle Action # 6. Begun as a reprint title, the book was quickly transitioned into a vehicle for original material as part of the company's expansion policy and the Black Panther (who was really T'Challa, king of the African nation of Wakanda) became the first black hero to headline his own strip. (Sure, it might be considered that the Falcon was there first, but he shared billing below that
of Captain America). Right off the bat however, any reader picking up this issue was signaled that the Panther strip wasn't going to be their father's kind of super-hero comic! Taking place entirely in Wakanda (up to this point, most of the Panther's adventures had taken place in the United States or other first world countries), the Panther would face challenges from a number of home-grown, but no less bizarre villains beginning here with Killmonger. In addition, the Panther would also wrestle with an identity crisis and guilt over having abandoned his duties as leader of the nation (to join the Avengers). Had he been co-opted by the values of western civilization? Seduced by the glitter of its sciences that had transformed Wakanda into a technological wonderland at the cost of his people's culture? Struggling to find the answers, T'Challa was frequently pulled toward one side or the other first by the barbs of Monica
Lynne, a street smart American who liked to deflate Wakandan pretensions and then by his own advisors who pressed him to re-embrace the traditions of his native land. "You done playing your jungle lord act, Ta-Charlie," asks Monica. "Would you like me to play Jane-Monica?" "My chieftain, you cannot allow this outsider to disrupt the dignity of this court." "Dig high and mighty, here. From first take he's been giving me dagger eyes…" It was a decidedly different approach to the Panther and the driving force behind it was Don McGregor. A longtime fan recently turned pro (one of Marvel's original letter writers, with his earliest contributions going all the way back to the first issues of the FF, he kept it up with impressive regularity for almost a decade before breaking in to comics professionally at Warren), McGregor got his foot in the door at Marvel as an editorial assistant before landing his first regular scripting gig with the Panther. In love with words, he wasn't afraid of using them and nobody seemed better at it than he was as he used them like surgical instruments to dissect the feelings and motivations of his characters no matter how minor. Doing so turned any strip he touched into multi-leveled gold (except when he left mainstream comics; away from the strictures of the Comics Code, these very advantages became his undoing). No less important to the strip than McGregor's writing was the art by Rich Buckler. One by one now, all the new young artists who'd started work at Marvel during the twilight years began to come into their own: Craig Russell, Paul Gulacy, Frank Brunner, Jim Starlin, Mike Ploog and now it was Buckler's turn as he embarked on the Panther strip with enthusiasm, filling it with time lapse sequences, zoom shots and panel breakdowns that helped underline character bits. The bad news was that Buckler would leave the strip with # 9 (it would be taken over with the good but less interesting work of Billy Graham); but the good news was that he'd leave to work on a new feature of his own creation. All in all, the Black Panther strip would turn out to be one of the crown jewels of Marvel's twilight years made all the more valuable for its membership in a species that would soon become as extinct as the dinosaurs.
93) Continuing to take advantage of the ongoing boomlet in horror comics, Lee and Thomas were in constant pursuit of new features to fill all the titles the company had on its schedule. Already having used the Universal monsters and raided their own books for likely prospects, the two men reached the point where they needed to look around in some of the less familiar corners of the genre.# And so, it was only a matter of time before Voodoo received its share of attention. Having freshly broached the subject in the recently released black and white magazine Tales of the Zombie, it was only natural that Thomas would use as a source of inspiration for Strange Tales 169 and the creation of "Brother Voodoo". Credited on the splash page for "creative contributions" were Thomas and art director John Romita, who no doubt came up with the character (Romita supplied the cover which might've doubled as a concept sketch before the book was produced). Brother Voodoo was simply successful psychologist Jericho Drumm before the spirit of his dead brother united with and transformed him into the lord of the Loa. You see, brother Daniel was the first Brother Voodoo, and upon his death at the hands of Damballah, the serpent god, his powers were transferred to an unwilling and (disbelieving) Jericho. Naturally, Jericho becomes a believer, at least in the power of Brother Voodoo, and embarks on a mission to protect mankind from those who would exploit the secrets of voodoo to their own evil ends.# Sounds like fun doesn't it? Well, it was, for about five issues before the feature was canceled. Widely excoriated and ridiculed since, the strip deserved no such fate. Handily written by Len Wein (a fan who'd begun his career at rival DC where he created that company's own version of a muck monster in the Swamp-Thing) and drawn by Gene Colan (who was literally unstoppable in these years), the strip evoked a certain weirdness quite different from the world of Dr. Strange, Jericho's white counterpart. Tackling such bizarre menaces as Damballah, Baron Samedi and the Black Talon, Brother Voodoo also managed to assemble an interesting supporting cast including the houngan Papa Jambo and Mama Limbo, police detectives Pete Hawkins and Samuel Tate and potential romantic interest, Loralee Tate. Filled with Colan's favored nighttime settings and "special effects" (no one could come up with more ways to illustrate Brother Voodoo's supernatural powers of changing to smoke, walking through fire or spirits merging with humans than he did), each issue seemed to get better and better with the final two the best when Dick Giordano, another DC expatriot, provided some wonderfully ethereal inks. There was only one problem though. Weakened as it had become by this time, the Comics Code as it turned out, still had some teeth. Although many rules had been softened, there were still some that were hard and fast including a ban on the use of the word "zombie" in a comic book! But what was a comic about voodoo without the requisite walking dead to go with it? To solve the problem, a new word was coined: zuvembie. But whatever drawbacks there were in not being able to use the word "zombie", the new word still seemed to have a ring of authenticity about it. In fact, some readers actually preferred it to the real thing! It was just another cool reason to like the Brother Voodoo strip, no doubt a valiant effort by everyone involved and not in the least deserving of the neglect that's been its fate. (Fun fact: with this issue, Marvel revived the venerable title of "Strange Tales" after a four year absence, picking up the numbering from the last issue of that book which had been # 168. But the odd thing was, when the title ended and its two features [Shield and Dr. Strange], had been awarded their own books, the first issue of Dr. Strange was numbered at…# 169!)
94) Moving swiftly from its introduction in the black and white Savage Tales magazine to a try out in Adventure Into Fear to its own title, the Man-Thing feature rose quickly in the hierarchy of Marvel's monster books. Having been introduced at nearly the same time as DC's own Swamp-Thing, the Man-Thing early on benefited from the ironic scripting services of the former's creator, Len Wein (who'd since moved to Marvel from DC). But the Man-Thing feature really didn't come into its own until Steve Gerber arrived to take over the writing and horror meister Mike Ploog took time off his duties on the Werewolf book to do the art. Eventually becoming one of the most eclectic writers in comics, Gerber was a hard-boiled fan before being hired by Roy Thomas as an assistant editor. As if to compensate for the more prosaic world of advertising where he'd been working before, Gerber hit the ground running with his first regular scripting assignment on the Man-Thing, rapidly turning in weird, even twisted stories that skirted the edge of what was allowed by the Comics Code. In Man-Thing # 5, for instance, Gerber opens the story with a clown's suicide (although the deadly shot is fired off camera, the clown is shown pressing the pistol to his head just before the telltale sound effect echoes through the swamp), throws in a penny-ante traveling circus (which includes Tragg, "the world's strongest man!") a couple of runaways and then has all of them running around the swamp alternatively chasing and being chased by the ghost of the deceased clown! Even the decision to have a clown, the very image of happiness and laughter, be the suicide victim was a strange choice in contrasts ("Laughter is dead. Futility," reads his final note). "I had never thought of writing horror or fantasy," Gerber has admitted. "I found I had a knack for it…and discovered that working on books like Man-Thing could be very advantageous, because they weren't the assignments that everybody else was after. Nobody else really cared about them!" It was a recipe for weirdness as Gerber began to build his reputation on the strange and bizarre. Here in Adventure Into Fear # 17 he came up with a retelling of the origin of Superman that was twisted inside-out and followed that with the introduction of a wise-cracking, cynical mallard, a dark-Donald Duck in the Man-Thing's debut issue. Later, he turned the Defenders, an average super-hero feature, from bland vanilla to wild tutti-frutti! And although the much too staid art style of Sal Buscema prevented his work on the Defenders from going completely off the deep end, Ploog's work on Man-Thing was perfect (except that here too, for most of Ploog's issues, other inkers would sap his pencils of much of their vitality). This issue for instance, is stocked with the artist's patented characterizations of gnarled, bent human beings, physical deformities that reflected the twisted nature of their personalities: the dead clown is a boneless thing floating in the swamp; Boss Garvey, the venal carnival owner has a flaccid face continuously contorted in hate; Tragg is a cauliflower-eared hulk with a thatch of tangled hair to indicate his head. But the main attraction of Ploog's work is the Man-Thing himself in which the artist seemed to like saving up his creative strength for close-ups showing the muck monster with its glassy, emotionless eyes staring out at the reader. Although frequently uneven in quality, Gerber and Ploog would set the Man-Thing strip apart from its counterpart at the competition by telling stories that not only were a combination of fantasy and horror (with a dash of social commentary) but were unpredictable too.
95) Jim Starlin, who became one of the earliest, if not the earliest, writer/artists in comics was another of the fast developing new talents at Marvel. (Sure, it'd been done before with Adams and Steranko being only two of the latest and there were a few others in the long history of comics, but the phenomenon was both rare and usually intermittent while Starlin actually heralded a new wave of creators who'd write and draw almost everything they did). Unlike many of his peers, Starlin didn't enter the ranks of comics professionals through a shop or by being the assistant of an established artist, he came in through the fan magazines where he'd spent time providing them with spot illustrations. Then, taking his courage in hand, he went up to Marvel's offices (might as well start at the top right?) and to his surprise, picked up an assignment for a romance story. The next thing he knew, despite his inexperience, he was working in the office laying out covers for the company's huge line of books. From there, he bounced around doing some inking here, and some finished pencils there until picking up some regular assignments and doing his first, crude work on fill-ins on such titles as Iron Man and Marvel Premiere. But even on these first full-length jobs, although he didn't script them, there's evidence that he was involved in the plotting with elements in the stories that he'd take from one assignment to the next until eventually bringing them all together on the troubled Captain Marvel book. Begun in the grandiose years, maybe more for copyright purposes than serious storytelling, the Captain Marvel feature never had a permanent focus and went through more changes than any other strip in so short a time. Consequently, Lee and Thomas might've felt like they had nothing to lose in allowing Starlin full creative control of the title. Coming on as penciler for # 26, Starlin was at first teamed with scripter Mike Freidrich (credit for plotting was clearly given to the artist on the splash page) but by the time Captain Marvel # 29 arrived, Starlin was credited with scripting, pencils and even coloring! With all of the reins gathered in his hands, the first thing Starlin did was proceed to remake Captain Marvel to suit himself. He spends his first 19 page story not with slam-bang action, but with a quasi-psychological mystery play that ends with Cap becoming "cosmically aware." In between bouts of our hero battling his own ego, evil self or whatever, readers were treated with vignettes meant to set up a vast, inter-stellar struggle which would tie up all the loose plot threads Starlin had been littering his fill-in jobs with over the past few months: first there's the origin of an off-shoot race of gods descended from those of legendary Olympus based out of Titan, a moon of Saturn; then there's the ongoing struggle between the evil Thanos (who worships the personification of Death) and his Titan-based family; still on the loose from previous issues is the Destroyer who died and was reborn specifically to hunt down and destroy Thanos; and finally there was the fate of Cap's friend, Rick Jones. With these elements, Starlin launched a storyline that would be stretched to incredible lengths as he took Captain Marvel through various stages of self-awareness, pseudo-religion and cosmic conflict and ended up redefining the cosmic epic first popularized in comics by Lee/Kirby/Ditko and then Thomas/Adams. In tandem with the start of this new kind of story, Starlin's art this issue suddenly crystallizes, leaves behind its former roughness and takes on the form that was to become familiar to his legion of fans for the remainder of his career. Starlin's assumption of near complete control of the Captain Marvel book (and any other strip he subsequently worked on) was probably the quickest such rise as any newcomer had experienced since Steranko burst on the scene in the late 1960s. But what differentiated Starlin's work from Steranko's was its intensely personal nature: where Steranko's approach came from such outside influences as pulp magazines, film, advertising, pop culture and other legendary creators in the comics industry, Starlin's came almost purely from within himself and provided readers with a short, but utterly unique ride they'd not soon forget!
96) After a shaky start on the Werewolf by Night feature in Marvel Spotlight and coming quickly into his own on Monster of Frankenstein, artist Mike Ploog seemed to peak early before concluding his stay at Marvel with more lackluster work through the mid-seventies. On the other hand, there might've been mitigating circumstances preventing him from doing the best he could. For instance, as soon as it was realized that Ploog's style represented a major asset for the company's growing horror line, he was given one feature after another to illustrate, many concurrently. And as Ploog himself has admitted, he was still in the process of learning how to be an artist. But just as he seemed to be getting the hang of it, the amount of work caught up to him and he either began to rush through it or had incompatible inkers assigned to finish his work. For the most part, those partnerships didn't turn out to be happy marriages with much of the visceral quality of Ploog's art being lost in the translation. The problem was, Ploog's best inker was himself (he finished his own pencils over his early work on Werewolf and Frankenstein) and as the demand on his time grew, he had less of it to spend putting the finishing touches on his pencils. But fortunately there was at least one more instance in which Ploog was able to give his work the attention it deserved. Temporarily dropping his duties elsewhere, he poured all his efforts into what would become his masterpiece, Kull the Destroyer # 11. The Kull feature, as has been noted, was at a crisis point in its short life. Always the weak sister to Conan's robust sales figures, it was never able to break from bi-monthly to monthly frequency and at last, Thomas decided that drastic changes were needed in order to give the book one last shot at success. Consequently, writer Gerry Conway and artist Marie Severin (who'd given stellar, if unappreciated, work on the title since # 2), were dismissed and Ploog brought in to give the book a radical, new look. Thomas himself would take a turn at scripting the feature which took a new direction with Kull being dethroned and embarking on a quest to regain the crown of his lost kingdom. To underline the changes being made, Thomas even had the title of the book slightly altered to read Kull "the Destroyer" instead of the more regal sounding "Conqueror" and to insure its success, this issue's story was based on "By This Axe I Rule," one of Robert E. Howard's most popular Kull tales. Ironically, the original story was rewritten from a Kull vehicle to one starring Conan and became the first tale of the fighting Cimmerian to see print in the legendary pulp magazine Weird Tales. Filled with spectacular art, every page, almost every panel, presents the reader with visions of pounding action that leaves no doubt that given the time and effort, Ploog was an artist of top flight caliber. From the opening pages showing the rain-lashed capital of Valusia to the secret gathering of sinister conspirators, Ploog sets the scene for the sombre events to come. Exerting himself as never before, the artist fills every setting with lush detail and demonstrates an unexpected command of the human figure as naked bodies ripple with musculature that give his two dimensional characters a rarely sensed feeling of three dimensionality. Especially impressive are panels showing the king in his private chambers sprawled in a fur covered chair, his traitorous knights as they burst in upon Kull and a three quarter page shot of a ragged, bleeding Kull, back against a wall, gore dripping from the axe in his hand, but still defiant. Oh, it was a great book all right, but such a level of quality could never be maintained, and Ploog's work slipped in # 12. After # 13, he was gone, but it didn't matter; the last-minute changes made no difference to sales, and soon after Ploog's departure, the strip was finally canceled. |
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