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House Style Stalwart: Sal Buscema

Today's comics rely heavily on the reputations of celebrity talent to sell the few comics that pass a cash register these days. One can see the force of celebrity (or anti-celebrity) when observing reader reactions to a change in staff; adding or removing a celebrity talent has a great potential to make or wreck a title.

Someone who reads today's comics might well forget an era when comics publishers worked with a house style. The key players of the Silver Age, DC and Marvel, both promoted works that centered around official or unofficial designated styles; and Marvel, in particular, once built its comics around styles defined by specific talents, originally Stan Lee's writing style and Jack Kirby's art style.

This axis shifted permanently when Marvel lost Kirby, and tried to redefine its company look more around stalwart John Buscema's style, influencing a number of artists during the seventies, including the much-esteemed George Perez.

Sal Buscema came into his own under the umbrella of the John Buscema house style and, though clearly derivative in his work, nonetheless managed to distinguish himself by endearing pieces across a long span of years and many titles. Today, he receives little credit for a body of work that deserves more attention than collectors and readers care to give it, since the celebrity system thrives on a gunslinger principle that relies on gimmicks and quirks that Sal Buscema did not use in his work.

If, however, the act of producing consistently fine work within a house style, by today's standards, disqualifies Sal Buscema from consideration among the great craftsmen of the trade of comics, this decision ignores aesthetic considerations - the reaction the work has on its observers - and substitutes a cult of novelty that has put comics in a stranglehold of more and more bizarre exaggeration. Sal Buscema worked in a world not overly realistic, nor overly cartoonish, nor dominated by an inner weirdness a reader might have to learn to appreciate; to him, handsome and accessible work fulfilled his artistic aims.

Sal as Inker

Prior to 1971, Sal Buscema had done his best work not as a penciller but as an inker (the side of the profession that enjoys his attentions at the end of the century). The classic Silver Surfer original series enjoyed art that almost hurt to look at thanks to the drop-down-dead combination of John Buscema's pencils and Sal's voluptuous inks. Furthermore, the Barry Windsor-Smith Conan books also enjoyed what Sal Buscema's brush could lay down; and, as the sample demonstrates, Sal also had that certain something it took to bring out the best in Herb Trimpe's pencils, a talent that did not grace the pen of just any inker.

During this period, Sal Buscema did ink work of a quality that few pencillers subsequently enjoyed. John Buscema's work would never look better than it did under Sal Buscema's brush and pen; Barry Windsor-Smith's art would, for the first time, receive inks that actually did something for the art; and pieces of this sort, had Sal Buscema never touched another page of comics work, would still suffice to make an aesthete long for the days near the turn of 1970.

Early Pencil Work

As a penciller, Sal Buscema developed a style clearly derivative of John Buscema's style (one would see a similar parallel in the styles of John and Marie Severin). When he enjoyed his aesthetic peak, it remained within the idiom of a version of John's style, perhaps with slightly prettier faces and slightly less Kirby-influenced dynamism.

In some of his earliest recorded penciling jobs, however, Sal Buscema's style showed somewhat less of this influence, both in proportions, facial structure, and body language.

The Essential Sal Buscema

The pieces that demonstrate the best of what Sal Buscema had to offer as an artist appeared in his early-seventies treatment of Captain America, where he enjoyed the benefit of Steve Englehart's pen for some hard-hitting stories like the tale of the Phoenix (the son of Baron Zemo, who now appears in the Marvel Universe as Baron Zemo) and the effective, if politically dubious, "Captain America of the Fifties" stories. Sal Buscema added a bright and energetic quality to the title that seemed to disappear under subsequent artists.

Sal Buscema's work on Captain America and the Falcon would represent his most memorable work and definitely shows an enthusiasm that not all of his efforts seemed to receive. While earlier work on such titles as Avengers had allowed him to form the basic elements of his style, his pencilling and storytelling would reach their longest consistent plateau in the Englehart-S. Buscema era of this title; and his memorable work on later titles would reflect the abilities he had honed depicting Captain America and the Falcon.

Add to this esteemed portfolio a fortunate period within Sal Buscema's work on Incredible Hulk, especially when graced with the softer inking style Josef Rubenstein employed in the mid-seventies and you have a package that tells what Sal Buscema fans appreciate.

The Slump of the Late Seventies

Not all of his work would possess the impact of his best work; Sal Buscema's style varied over the years and within specific periods as well, and inkers sometimes did not help his pencils get the effect across. Sam Grainger, for instance, in the early Avengers sample above, made his pencils come out as solid and three-dimensional shapes. Other inkers, like Jim Mooney, would do little for his work.

Combine this with a "Marvel Malaise" of the late seventies that seemed to show in the work of a number of survivors from Marvel's proud domination of the market in the sixties - a malaise that might also answer to the names "overwork" or "burnout" - and one can find adequate fodder to arm the mean-spirited attacks by critical fans who had harried Sal Buscema in letters columns from the very earliest days of his career.

One could quickly find a number of points of style where this cover fails. The faces appear flat, with perspective cues missing or misdirected (notice the strange perspective of Hulk's right arm and of Betty's hair). Sal Buscema did a number of pieces no better than this cover over a number of years, but it takes little deep thought to consider the unfairness of judging all of his work by his weakest pieces. For some perspective, compare the writing of Mark Waid in "The Return of Barry Allen" and in The Kingdom; the contrast suggests that everyone will eventually suffer an off-day or more.

Divorced from a context of Sal Buscema's work-load (and the load on his inkers as well, since he, like Herb Trimpe, created pages that remained very sensitive to the inks that covered the pencils).

One does not define the look of a character that provides a standard by which to judge one's successors with consistently lame work, yet Sal Buscema did create, for many readers, definitive versions of Captain America and the Hulk. Older readers who visualize either character may quickly evoke an image of Sal Buscema's treatments.

We don't see much of Sal's work these days, preferring (if sales mean anything) a certain type of gunslinger artist (bigger! louder! faster! quirkier!). So much the worse for the industry, truly, if it has no use for work that causes neither headaches nor nightmares. In another day, however, readers recognized the image of Marvel vitality in the pages that bore Sal Buscema's imprint.