web hosting short URLs photo sharing

Gene Colan's Mood and Mayhem

In the days just after the close of the Silver Age, I sometimes mused about comics that seemed to have lost their direction. I wondered why Iron Man seemed to lack something. I didn't understand that guy Frank Miller who somehow managed to attract a lot of attention to himself on Daredevil. I yawned when Jim Starlin did away with Marvel's Captain Marvel. I dropped Captain America altogether because I couldn't relate to the exaggerated anatomy he applied to the star of that title; Zeck, if he represented what would come in the industry regarding superheroic anatomy, seemed to miss the point.

The only Marvel stuff that I seemed to enjoy did not seem to survive long; periods of Doctor Strange, Howard the Duck, or even bizarre pieces like DC's Phantom Zone limited series.

Today, it strikes me like a rock in the face: All of the Marvel works I no longer enjoyed had, once upon a time, moved me. Furthermore, a consistent thread moved through all those books between 1968 and 1972, but had moved to other things in the early eighties: Gene Colan's art.

A Man for All Titles

It strikes me now, many years after the fact, a remarkable thing about Gene Colan. He could handle Captain America, Iron Man, Dr. Strange, Superman, the early Marvel Captain Marvel, Howard the Duck, Daredevil, the Sub-Mariner, the Spectre, and Batman and seem completely natural in handling them. His style did not strain to include this range of heroes; they did not seem mishandled; and each of them adapted to his characteristically dark treatments without losing anything (indeed, some of them gained in his hand).

Even the best hands in the business, and the best of his peers of the Silver Age, sometimes failed to make another's creation work. For instance, Neal Adams' realism seemed to do something strange to Captain America (though few humans could ever be fortunate enough to look as good as something Adams draws); Jack Kirby's blockish style made Spider-Man a difficult subject for him; and each luminary of the fervent comics of the sixties tended to have some particular character that clashed with the finer points of his (or her) style.

Under Colan's hand, however, characters never seemed incomplete or wrong as they might when handled by a number of his more-celebrated peers. Also, like a number of talents vindicated by the passing of time, Colan retains the essence of a single underlying style in work that does not become stagnant with self-reference and increasing exaggeration of idiosyncracy. His taste for proportions might drift, and his line might lighten or darken, but Colan knows what makes a panel work in 1969, 1979, 1989, and 1999.

Colan's Background

Colan began work in comics way, way back in 1944, as an eighteen-year-old from the Bronx, until the Second World War pulled him away from this work and into the Army Air Corps. Upon his return, he enjoyed a year's training at the Art Students' League, and soon went looking for work at Timely (Marvel's early incarnation) and DC.

At Timely, a similarly youthful Stan Lee saw the merit of his early work and set him on titles like Menace, Mystic, and Journey into Mystery for some sixty dollars per week. After some time on such titles, Colan migrated to DC to do work on Sea Devils and Hopalong Cassidy, both titles typifying the shift in comics tastes after the war ended and most superhero titles failed. Colan would then return to Timely, now known as Marvel, in time to participate in the much-described Marvel Revolution.

His credentials fit a pattern for a number of eminent names connected to both the Silver and Golden Ages of comics; like Bill Everett, Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, and Gil Kane, he came to Marvel's comics renaissance with years of experience and some relevant education, but himself predated the comic book (Action #1 would have appeared in Colan's eleventh or twelfth year). Thus, he might have seen the developments in the medium, including the initial wave of Golden Age heroes; the great die-off as the loss of sales to soldiers overseas shifted the demographics of comics and saw the birth of other forms, including western and romance comics; and the rediscovery of the superhero by DC and Marvel between 1956 and 1961.

The Early Marvel Dynamic

Flying fists, ranting soliloquies, and emotive reveries all distinguished the works that brough Marvel back from the brink of Atlas' collapse. While DC still dealt with comics that sold clean and upbeat treatments of high-minded, iconic heroes made interesting with massive infusions of science fictional content, Marvel's model used a different mix.

Lee figured comics needed a human face, and approached heroes as people invested with powers rather than an empowered and costumed bundle of ideals. He applied this model even to obviously iconic characters like Captain America, subjecting them to storms of emotion, festivals of self-doubt, and hormonal surges of temper and fear. Where a DC character would either remind his villain of his inevitable fate behind bars or crack a stupid pun while punching his target's lights out, his Marvel equivalent would sweat, grimace, yell, and dwell on his "greatest challenge ever." This made DC's comics better (theoretically) for imparting virtue and Marvel's comics better for providing characters to whom readers could relate.

Marvel's sales vindicated this model, at least in the scale of the first decade of its new superhero model.

In such an environment, one would expect Colan to thrive more under Marvel than under DC. Colan's style relied not on clean lines and shapes like a Swan or Sekowsky. Colan's work brooded and lurked; his subjects acted in twisted into postures that would put a real-world yogi into a body cast. Colan already enjoyed a style that blended quirk and craft, in that he retained a distinctive approach but remained accessible in the process.

Within DC's titles, not even Batman would have known how to use Colan before Dennis O'Neil and Neal Adams returned that character to a form more true to his origins. One therefore sees the inevitability of Colan's tenure with Marvel, even where Marvel's gain proved DC's loss.

Daredevil and Tenure

In the sixties, Colan danced acrossed titles, as mentioned earlier. He ushered Iron Man into his own title, after working on his early stories in the double-titles during the two-per phase of Marvel's history. He did most of the major titles during this period, with obvious exceptions locked in by regular talent (Spider-Man, with Ditko and later John Romita, Sr.; Fantastic Four, with Jack Kirby).

Colan put in an enduring tenure on Daredevil beginning in the sixties and lasting into the seventies. If we ignore short absences from the title, we can consider this tenure to have ended with the appearance of Frank Miller in 1979; a body of work spanning around ten years could well include representative samples of just about everything a talent could do with it.

Colan made Daredevil work in a dark setting more consistent with the blindness of the character, and this darkness would continue under Frank Miller's hand. Unlike Miller, however, Colan worked without the ornaments typical of that phase of his work; Colan's worked on stories by other writers who kept the character somewhat within the superheroic model, though still somewhat isolated from the mainstream of the Marvel universe, a place Daredevil maintains even in 1999. Colan worked in tones, mood, and action, without benefit of Milleresque tools like invasive armies of ninjas and psychopathic antiheroes armed with lethal weaponry.

With Marv Wolfman, Colan also completed a long run on Marvel's Dracula titles, to which, like Dr. Strange, Colan's murkiness seemed particularly apt. However, this particularly talented artist did not, evidently, use his comics noir stylings as an excuse to become so self-important that his humor left him; the very strange Steve Gerber creation Howard the Duck enjoyed his imprint. Colan's work in that title in no way fails to compare well with his work on more serious titles.

Stan Lee, Inkers, and Colan's Style

Some Silver Age comics historians mention that Stan Lee once considered eliminating comics inkers altogether, an act that seems strange out of context and certainly contrary to the technologies of the comics industry during the height of his career. Some pencillers do or have produced work that, with the right reproduction, could skip inks altogether (consider Kirby and George Perez).

While many may consider this notion of Lee's a cheap way to reduce costs by putting inkers out of work, recall that Lee got to see comics pages from blank board to finished, stitched product and knew how a pencilled page looked. A page of Kirby pencils might have inspired this abortive program, but I tend to favor the notion that Gene Colan's style inspired this idea. His work flows from a loose spray of pencilled lines that inkers either painstakingly retain or cull (at the expense of much detail but not form or flow).

Colan himself has experimented with pencil-only work that went straight from his leads to a colorist, and much of his style in the eighties suggested that inkers chose to remain close to what he lay on the page rather than embellishing or editing. Furthermore, with the home digital optic technologies like flatbed scanners available to even impecunious aspirants to comicdom, the color-over-pencils approach may appear more in the future; a simple threshhold contrast setting suffices to render soft gray pencils into the pure blacks that color printing handles best.

Lee's experiment never went anywhere, perhaps for the better, since without Marvel's inkers, we would never have seen the stunning inks that Sal Buscema used to finish the work of John Buscema or Barry Windor-Smith; we would have missed Joseph Rubenstein, Klaus Janson, and Terry Austin when they distinguished themselves working for Marvel; we might have missed Jim Steranko altogether, whose earliest Nick Fury work included inks on Kirby's pencils. Joe Sinnott would never have brightened the pencils of Jack Kirby, John Buscema, or Keith Pollard.

Colan, though, must have made the idea seem, at least fleetingly, like a possibility. In the eighties, back with DC, Colan would realize both his desire to create a detective comic and his interest in the no-inks experiment with the Nathaniel Dusk title.

Gene Today

Gene still dabbles in the form even at the end of the century; sometime in 1997 or 1998, he returned to Daredevil to pencil at least one story, and the feel hadn't really changed, even if the proportions and line weights had. We may note that a strong concept will allow its bearer some leeway, and that Colan's style can endure tigher and looser inks, since his use of motion, shape, and darkened space all stand strongly enough to overwhelm a hostile inker's potential dessires to undermine them.

Colan, by defining his style rather than allowing the Marvel house style to shape his work, created a substantial approach to linear art that eschewed most of the gimmicks that trivialized comics since the 1960s. He knows how to tell a story without extreme closeups of mouthfuls of teeth and without anatomical treatments that make Bertil Fox look scrawny and Anna Nicole Smith hoydenish.

Comics has become a specialized language that readers must learn to speak early in life to fully appreciate; for instance, the "New Comics" represented a variant of the superhero form that many readers never learned to understand. A younger generation of cartoonists learned how to disturb and agitate without subtlety; but the glaring and pathogenic approach that the best of their number sometimes take to setting mood ultimately dulls senses by burning them out. Overkill of this sort, though, will tend to follow one of two paths: It will continue to exaggerate until it no longer resembles what it intends to depict; or it will jade readers who can no longer get the impact of the overblown and lose interest.

If such a thing as superhero comics survives into the twenty-first century, observers of the first century or more of the medium will likely recognize Colan's work as immune to the obsolescence of a generation of faddish successors who, though often genuinely talented, fell to the lure of disposible gimmickry. As the nuances of the human voice disappear when everyone screams, so too do comics lose something when creators banish all subtlety from them.

We should learn as much as we may from Gene Colan while we still have him in recent memory, for he knows how to disturb subtly; how to create creeping glooms that sneak under the doors and hide under the beds; and how to set a tone not like a screaming imp but more like the place under your bed where that imp might hide.

Visit Gene Colan's official web page (containing older and more recent work and interviews) at Gene Colan's Virtual Studio, or even email him at his public email address gene@genecolan.com.

Return to the Quarter Bin.
Email the author at ouzomandias@mailexcite.com.