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Murphy Anderson

Born early enough to remember the appearance of the first superhero comics - among a generation of talents born before 1930 that included Gil Kane, Gene Colan, Stan Lee, and a general roster of Silver Age talent - Murphy Anderson came into comics as a consumer, realized what he liked, and, for significant moments of his career, got to live out the fantasy of working on one's own favorite comics piece.

Like many well-remembered talents of DC's Silver Age, Anderson began his comics work in the forties - around 1944, from a background that included color separation work in the military and a stint as penciler on the Buck Rogers strip around 1947. He came to DC comics at the dawn of the 1950s, soon to make a name frequently in conjunction with other significant figures of the Silver Age; for instance, in DC's science fiction comics of the mid-fifties (and into the sixties), Anderson frequently teamed with Carmine Infantino, finishing his pencils with a polish that gave such works a definitively Silver Age feel. Subsequently, his work on Superman books would involve membership in a troika of talents (with Curt Swan and Dennis O'Neil) that would ultimately bear his name, if as part of a collective pseudonym (the "Swanderson" books).

Pulp and Science Fiction Roots

One sees, in the talents of the Silver Age, a frequently-occuring pattern of exposure to pulps from the heyday of that form. Anderson demonstrates this principle, both as a fond follower of pulp literature and as an enthusiast of both comic books and newspaper comics, a taste perhaps initially developed by his mother's use of comics as a tool to teach the young Anderson to read (an approach also used on the author of this column).

From North Carolina, Murphy Anderson found his way into the comics business of the 1940s, beginning his career at Fiction House with pieces like Star Pirate, a work whose name suggests a recurring theme of various points of his career. Anderson came to comics from a background as a consumer - to some degree of comic books, but more so as a reader of the adventure strips of the heyday of newspaper comics in the thirties - and would return to science fiction material at some point during every decade of his comics career. Thus, we note Star Pirate and the Buck Rogers strip (1940s); Captain Comet stories (1950s); Adam Strange and the science-fiction version of Hawkman (1960s); DC's interpretation of Burroughs' "John Carter of Mars" stories (1970s); and, again, the Buck Rogers strip (1985).

In an unusual turn, Anderson also freelanced for Fiction House as an illustrator during his stint in the United States Navy, moonlighting with assignments aquired through a contact with editor and science fiction writer Ray Palmer, whose name Julius Schwartz would later attach to Gil Kane's Silver Age Atom. Via the expedient of the post office, Anderson therefore managed to contribute to the Buck Rogers strip during his enlistment.

Initially returning to North Carolina after completion of his term as a sailor, Anderson soon returned to publishing, through Ziff-Davis, a move which would pull him back into a permanent residency in New York. As an illustrator of science fiction magazines, Anderson worked with Jerry Siegel (co-creator of Superman) until the contraction of the comics and science fiction market at the dawn of the fifties inspired him to look elsewhere for more regular employment, whereupon Murray Boltinoff made him an offer to work for DC, beginning a relationship that would last for decades.

Schwartz-Era Pieces

Anderson recalls his first DC works as contributions to Mystery In Space and Strange Adventures, two fifties-era science fiction titles inspired by Schwartz' influence on the DC line.

However, as the superhero market began to pick up again, especially after the early success of the Justice League of America concept which followed the payoff of Schwartz' initial gamble in reinventing DC's superheroes to begin with, he would find his assignments shifting more towards this line.

Prior to this point, Anderson had worked in the complete page - meaning as a penciler and as an inker - and found it somewhat foreign to handle assignments where Schwartz would designate some artists as specifically pencilers and others as inkers. At that stage Anderson began his role as an inker, occasionally shifting gears to pencil when circumstances and deadlines demanded. Anderson, preferring to pencil and ink work, would frequently alternate pages with other artists, allowing him to serve both roles even as he worked in the assembly-line methods typical of the Schwartz-era comics shop.

As a finisher/inker, Anderson frequently found himself paired with Carmine Infantino, who, in his days as an artist consistently demonstrated an excellence of conception, execution, and design which DC could use most efficiently by having him pencil and providing him with other artists to ink (though generally the best they had available). This created many pieces considered classics of the DC Silver Age, and helped associate Infantino with Anderson as an art team of record.

Despite a preferred approach of specialization, however, DC did occasionally provide a venue for Anderson to depict from blank page to inks, such as on the early issues of Hawkman. Again, sensing a positive chemistry between Anderson's style and concepts rooted in the Golden Age of Comics, DC opted to allow him to handle various pieces featuring the members of the Justice Society of America, in such titles as Showcase, Brave and the Bold (back when, as a team-up book, it did not limit its combinations to Batman and someone else), and the sixties incarnation of Spectre.

Superheroes from the Golden and Silver Ages

Anderson would eventually find himself working on the National Periodical Publications / DC Comics superhero line as that material began to take off. Anderson had, for a short stint in 1958, attempted to return to the Buck Rogers strip, but then returned to DC not long afterwards; at that point, the up and coming product line dealt with superheroes, and Schwartz gave Anderson assignments in open projects, such as the reinvented Flash title which played the seminal role in the Silver Age reinvention of superheroes.

Much work that strikes the memory from Anderson's portfolio connected to the integration of Golden Age concepts into DC's Silver Age of comics. One aspect of such work involved the retrofitting of the Hawkman concept for a more science-fictional interpretation of superheroes in the era of Julius Schwartz (discussed here). Other elements, however, clearly treated Golden Age concepts within their own context, without drastic conceptual changes. Thus, we see Anderson's hand in artistic interpretations of characteristic Golden Age figures like the Spectre, Black Canary (prior to her incorporation into the "Earth-One" setting), and various members of the Justice Society.

While Anderson's work showed a polish shaped by fifties' and post-fifties' sensibilities, his style in the sixties still seemed mostly unmoved by the innovations going on at Marvel Comics, substituting a solidness and maturity for the contrived loudness and encouraged eccentricity of the (then-)upstart publishing concern. Thus, his style fit the material, in no particular undermining the credibility of creations from the forties by post-facto attempts to graft onto them standards of a later generation. That these works did not springboard the Golden Age heroes into their own series in no way implicates a lack of quality in their approach; the Justice Society of America has, since the sixties, suffered a number of abortive attempts to make them more viable in a contemporary superhero market, not really succeeding until the 1980s (with All-Star Squadron) and again in the late 1990s (with JSA).

Having established a working relationship with Carmine Infantino through both science fiction and superhero works, Anderson would do a number of remarkable cover pieces with Infantino for Batman books, etching his own name on the canon of a visually memorable period of the concept.

Anderson as Mentor

As DC Comics increasingly recognized Anderson's abilities as a finisher, decision-makers continued to pursue the specialist approach to comics art. Whereas Anderson consistently preferred to work in a comprehensive approach - meaning beginning with a blank page and delivering finished inks, with himself having done everything in between - DC's assembly-line approach frequently suggested that using Anderson as a foreground finisher and using other artists to handle the task of drawing backgrounds might allocate available resources more optimally. This left Anderson with a number of background assistants, sometimes including established talents of waning prestige in the comics marketplace (Anderson may have cited Jack Abel and Vince Colletta as sometime background assistants who had enjoyed better times in the business, and, ultimately, would do so again). Occasionally, though, Anderson would enjoy the services of young talents whom he could apprentice into the business through the role of background artist. From these origins we encounter, as the most prominent example, David Cockrum.

A substantial talent will frequently leave his imprint on a younger generation of artists, either through inspiring imitation or through launching other figures into the business. Anderson, for his part, seems instrumental in the launching of David Cockrum's career, having encouraged him at an early stage in his career to take the plunge into the role of a penciler. Though, according to Cockrum, editors initially gauged him as not-quite-good-enough (in an earnest, fanboyish way) to take a regular comics assignment, they nonetheless had a flagging comics concept, the Legion of Super-Heroes, on which they saw little risk in gambling on Cockrum's success. From such a podium, Cockrum, in a brief tenure, would not only redefine the Legion in a way that pulled it out of 1958 and thrust it forward into the seventies, but he would create a reputation that allowed him to move on to career-building assignments like his reinvention of the X-Men, a then-moribund franchise, with Len Wein.

Early Cockrum strongly implicates an Anderson influence in both approach to anatomy and in the use of a clean line with occasional heavy blacks in the inking. This influence comes through in spite of Cockrum's own idiosyncracies of page layout, costuming, and body language, which seem mainly to have sprung whole from Cockrum's brow rather than from the influence of Anderson's mentoring.

Superman's Swanderson Days

Though Anderson distinguished himself as a penciler, one might record his work of greatest reknown as that during his collaboration with Curt Swan on Superman books during the O'Neil - Swan - Anderson period. Swan, though he enjoyed a number of excellent inkers over his thirty-year tenure as official Superman tenure, perhaps never enjoyed a treatment of his pencils quite as substantial as that which Anderson provided to his works. Anderson kept Swan's feel while adding considerable polish in the process, producing pieces as clean as the lamented George Klein's inks, yet with much of the Anderson feel typical of his sixties work.

Swan himself, though never falling off from a standard of clean and solid rendering dating from his earliest works on Superman books, seemed more inclined to experiment with less formulaic page layout and different approaches to cinematography than in his works prior to the collaboration.

Conceptually, as Dennis O'Neil did much to make the Superman premise more credible to older readers, Anderson and Swan gave it a more somber, mature, and dignified look. More so than in previous interpretations, the Superman of this period had to think about things before he acted as various problems not immediately remediable by means of a deft application of brute force confronted the archetypical Man of Steel. Other inkers, before and after, might lose important nuances of the face as Swan put them on paper, but Anderson succeeded in bringing out the puzzlement, annoyance, anger, confusion, surprise, or elation - clearly but without gross overstatement.

Post-DC Works

Given Anderson's early work on the Buck Rogers strip in the late forties, we might note him as a natural to appear on the credits of a later interpretation of the same concept. So, thus, we find Anderson returning, circa 1985, to a Buck Rogers strip, over a generation after beginning his tenure with DC Comics.

Like many talents who moved on from mainstream comics to other livelihoods, Anderson seemed to have an affinity for the medium itself and, furthermore, for certain artistic relationships that consumers ultimately came to recognize as classic. For instance, as one of the last pieces of art we might see published with a Curt Swan credit - dated from 1996, the year he passed on - we find a cover to the hyper-derivative Big Bang Comics where Swan and Anderson, under the moniker "Swanderson" again, provided a splash representing a tale echoing the various Justice League of America stories following and including "Crisis on Earth-Two."

However, after the mid-1980s, Anderson's work in pencils or inks becomes increasingly rarefied, if my inability to locate examples either via Web searches and trawling back issue bins means what it seems to. We can expect as much, given Anderson's age; 1990 would have fallen not too far from his 65th birthday, and people do retire or have retirement thrust, unwanted, upon them. Also at such a point many who have worked all their lives take a change of profession. For instance, Jack Kirby, before or around his 70th birthday, returned to animation work, the business which had given him the grounding that would serve him so well and for so long in comics.

While time and the financial instability accompanying the comics business - one not known for providing its long-timers with renumerative retirement plans, or, indeed, much more than a pink slip and directions to the exit - often do drive talents out into other lines of work, some figures nonetheless keep a connection to the business where they established their reputations. So, then, Anderson turned to a different, but related business, founding Murphy Anderson Visual Concepts, a company that provides certain support services for comics production, including the color separation work in which Anderson opted to specialize.

Life in Colors

In part because changes in generations of comics creators resulted in some contrived obsolescence of talents, and in part because the business itself does not necessarily offer a lifetime of work, a number of talents found themselves either booted from their tenures or chose to move on to related fields in order to leave the tenuous business of monthly comics for a more secure or more rewarding business. We have Silver Age lions like Jim Steranko and Neal Adams in other lines of work, which include advertising and storyboarding; Herb Trimpe in teaching art; Gene Colan and Joe Kubert offering their own how-to courses for those wanting to enter the dubious field of comics; Kerry Gammill in creature design for movies (and possibly storyboarding); Marie Severin in color processing (the specialty in which she began her comics career); Keith Pollard in graphic design; and too many others to track down. Thus, we need note with little surprise that Anderson, too, retired from the role of comics penciler and went into business handling publishing color.

Such work offers promise in the context of a business suffering a boom-bust cycle on a generally dwindling overall market. Without dwelling on pessimistic prognoses about the future of comics, we can note that between crashes of the circulation figures of major titles of major publishers, someone who works in color processing can handle a variety of other publishing-related tasks for advertising, magazines, and book publishing. However, none of this seems likely to imprint upon the collective cultural consciousness anything like what will mark Anderson's career for posterity: the distinctive Hawkman, the somber Superman, the excellent covers with Infantino.

Such support services place him among the mostly-uncredited production specialists who, though they make the work of others look its best, don't gain a celebrity-style recognition themselves. Color work as currently understood generally doesn't leave the kind of trail a long-standing fan might want to follow, and those who remember well Anderson's better works might instead look to future anthologizations of his significant works for DC Comics, already appearing in a limited sense in pieces like Hawkman Archives. To this, perhaps future publications will focus on periods of specific concepts and titles to which Anderson lay his brushes, such as Mystery in Space (especially the Adam Strange stories), Flash, Batman, and, of course, the Superman stories he helped make classics with Curt Swan.

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Email the author at ouzomandias@mailexcite.com.

Column 261. Completed 05-JUN-2001.