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Giants of the Silver Age - John Buscema

"The Michaelangelo of Comics"

In a column I wrote earlier, I mentioned that, of the big names of the Silver Age pencilers now elevated to legendary status by both their achievements and the passage of time, the one I missed most is Neal Adams.

Perhaps the only reason that I didn't pick John Buscema first is because, although he has retired from the industry after a long, long stretch of dissatisfaction with his role in a limiting medium, he also left us so much material during his many years of work that it's difficult to miss him.

His name adorns the credits of The Avengers, of Fantastic Four, of the definitive first run of Silver Surfer; he replaced Jack Kirby on Thor after Kirby left to work for DC Comics; he appears in a vast catalog of reprints and anthologies, and therefore, unlike the works of Neal Adams, is not difficult to find. At one time or another, he guest-penciled almost everything Marvel produced.

That's not to say that John Buscema was no more than a work horse whose ability to put out in quantity endeared him to deadline-conscious editors who were willing to conveniently overlook quality. That does not describe him at all. John Buscema frequently assailed the senses with some work that was drop-down-dead gorgeous. In the height of the Silver Age his work, bearing diverse influences as broadly separated as Michaelangelo and Kirby, did much to define the style of Marvel Comics during its legendary, and conspicuously self-hyped, era of greatness.

A Matter of Luck

Comics wasn't necessarily what John Buscema intended to do as a career. Indeed, he had entered and left the industry once already before he entered Stan Lee's office.

His training and artistic roots lay in an education that included Manhattan's High School of Music and Art. During this phase of his education, Buscema also moonlighted for over a year at the Pratt Institute, honing up on life drawing (which shows in his diligence regarding anatomy) and design. Buscema took another year of life drawing, later, at the Brooklyn Museum, and sometimes one might wish that a minimum of anatomical education would go into the training of the up and coming talents of what remains of the industry.

Michaelangelo and Kirby

If you look at John Buscema's work during the height of his professional enthusiasm (I adduce this from the quality of his output during these years), it's hard not to conclude that he once took a great deal of pleasure in depicting the human form in motion, rippling with catlike muscles, in proportions not too different from some of the oils adorning the Sistine Chapel. This is not asinine inflation; to look at his depictions of the long-limbed Goliath around 1968 one finds suggestions of a study of Michaelangelo.

In an interview, Buscema described his return to comics after one abortive thrust into the industry earlier.

Unlike the young celebrities of today who receive so much overblown good and bad press, John Buscema was in his mid-to-late thirties when he came to Marvel. Buscema says that Stan Lee handed him a stack of Kirby stuff as study material, and, perplexed about what he was to do, Buscema cribbed some technique from Marvel's resident celebrity.

The fusion is, in some ways, strange. A reader can discern the Kirby touches in things like the explosions, some of the haymakers, and an occasional gape-mouthed profile; but all these things come through a John Buscema filter, with an entirely different concept of anatomy and facial composition. Where Buscema couldn't achieve a dynamism that matched Kirby's (and few pencilers could, then or now), he made up for it with the grotesqueness of anger expressions and the Raquel-Welch like female faces which defined his style.

Heir Apparent?

Descriptions of the turbulent reshuffling of talent that followed Jack Kirby's departure from Marvel Comics aren't always consistent about what the things Marvel's editors did actually meant, but John's own words suggest that inheriting Thor from Kirby about that time was a rather significant development involving some kind of change of status.

There were, however, definite limits to Buscema's work. If, at gunpoint, someone had forced him to adopt the mantle of the "comics creator" who, without outside input, delivers finished stories with his own pencils, inks, plotting, scripting, and what-have-you, they might have gotten a finished story out of him, but he would have protested the role. As a penciler, as Buscema saw it, he had to be both actor and director of a cinematic production he caused to appear on paper, and that involved considerable stretching of the imagination. He said he wasn't a writer in tones that in no way indicated that he was dissatisfied with this; the later industry myth that the greatest works must come from "comics creators" working alone and from the ground up seems never to have affected his concept of what he was doing, and this, perhaps, helped make him the team player he remained for many, many years with Marvel Comics.

Buscema did some excellent work on Thor after Kirby's departure from Marvel Comics, and his work did much to define the look of Marvel in the 1970s; to think of an artist whose work can be used as an axiom to define the Marvel style one need only point to Buscema even before Kirby left. Could he replace Kirby? No, because Kirby's hyperactivity would be difficult to match in another human being (and, even if you don't like a single thing Kirby did, you have to do some interesting mental contortions to deny that he stamped his likeness on the industry in a way that remains unparalleled).

Buscema, however, became more influential by default. After much of Marvel's brightest talent hit the door for a variety of causes ( this massive talent drain, included Neal Adams, Jack Kirby, Roy Thomas, and others ), those who stayed had an increased influence on the Marvel style. John Buscema, in a way, had even more influence, because Sal Buscema had, shortly after John started with Marvel, begun doing pencils in a style much influenced (though never, at its height, quite equal to) by John's; and Sal did many, many issues of Avengers, Captain America, The Incredible Hulk, The Defenders, and other titles. One might conclude that if one Buscema wasn't on a book's credits, the other was.

The Weight of Burnout

I typically date the end of the Silver Age with the publication of Avengers #97, because, although not necessarily an all-important endpoint (unlike the easier-to-define beginnings of the Silver Age in DC's revamping of the Flash in Showcase), a clear decline in the quality of many titles, both in writing and art, seemed to infect the Big Two comics publishers.

Some of it was due to a talent drain as a number of individuals realized that the career ladder wasn't leading where they wanted. Others were lost to production precisely because their professional credentials were so esteemed that they were promoted out of creating stories or pages themselves (consider DC's use of artists Carmine Infantino and Dick Giordano in various executive capacities). Others doubtless either realized they needed to follow where money led instead of doing comics, and comics itself was a contracting industry at the turn of the 1970s, although the industry of today would love to enjoy sales numbers typical of that period.

Buscema, evidently, had always wanted to do something more in a realistic than a heroic vein, including (so he says) biographical art of famous figures like Vincent van Gogh and Abraham Lincoln. And, by the early seventies, Buscema was doing Conan and it's black-and-white spinoff magazines and using this material to redefine his style away from spaceships and flying men to very human, if still heroic, figures who sweated and bled and walked through leech-infested swamps.

It's hard to believe that Buscema was enjoying himself very much during the seventies. His work after his stint on Avengers did not maintain its earlier dynamism, although still very sound and effective (in general). Was it ill-use on Marvel's part? They had, by 1971, frequently dropped emergencies in his lap for him to clean up (including the loss of Kirby and the abdication of Neal Adams), and he had begun to move into other things, such as Conan.

He also began teaching comics art, and co-authored How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way with Stan Lee, a work still in print and occasionally used in classrooms to this day, some twenty-odd years after its original publication. Even then, so short a time after what seems now like Buscema's peak in superhero comics, the samples he generated for the book lack the vigor and movement of his work up to 1969.

Facing the Eighties

Buscema returned--perhaps with considerable reservation--to penciling Avengers in the mid 1980s, perhaps as a consequence of dropping sales on titles like Conan.

However, to look at this period of his work--as represented by his covers of those issues--we can suspect that Buscema, then in his late fifties and perhaps already hoping to retire soon--may have simply been marking time.

As a rather extreme example, consider this eighties cover of The Avengers (credited to John Buscema, but not demonstrating much of his characteristic flourish of almost twenty years previously). This one, really, demonstrates all the vigor and robustness of a posed wedding photograph, and although it's still a handsome piece with a professional use of darks/lights and space to direct the viewer's attention, it's pretty tame if we compare it to the Giant-Size Avengers #2 cover displayed earlier in this document (with the "old" Avengers confronting the "new" Avengers, circa 1968).

One would hope that the Avengers do more inside this book than they seem to be doing on its cover. If not, this would have been a very slow moving story indeed.

What this seems like is a loss of enthusiasm in a man who has worked too long and too hard at something he loved for a while, but which eventually ceased to interest him. Perhaps he was ready to retire; he certainly has now, although occasionally he still appears at conventions among panels of featured speakers.

Did the industry slowly chew this man up until the last glimmer of the thrill of his work departed? Or did it just slowly leave him? At his worst, Buscema could still add much tone to a story, and he never declined in the drastic way that others in the industry seem to once they fell in love with their own reputations or felt they had become irreplaceable. But the works on this page do show a cumulative loss of vehemence that is difficult to deny. The earlier material jumps out at the reader, pulling him into the work; the later work sinks back into the page, drawing the eye but failing to compel.

Perhaps the developing celebrity system helped phase Buscema out of the industry. This system, after all, tends to sneer at the dedicated craftsmen who act as team players, while promoting this week's trendy prima donna. In other words, the system, right now, seems best suited to a rapacious industry in which individuals rise fast, make a killing, fade fast, then are replaced by the next celebrity.

What does that promise to the careerist who wants to spend an entire career (ten, twenty, or forty years) in the industry? It must discourage just the sort of talent that builds a stable product (a consistent book, for instance) and thereby a consistent readership (loyal readers who follow not just characters but the talent attached thereto).

It could be that Buscema read, and understood, the writing on the industry wall very well and left before could become uglier. It was, after all, the right time to get out; the young guns, not the stalwarts, dominate the business now.

If no one is reading what they produce, perhaps they'll eventually catch on about what's wrong with the celebrity system. But in the meantime, how many craftsmen like John Buscema are staying out of the business?

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Email the author at ouzomandias@mailexcite.com.