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Jim Aparo

Jim Aparo, born in the year 1932, belonged to a generation of Silver Age stalwarts too young to have worked in the Golden Age but who would form the backbone of the late sixties in the aftermath of the retirement (and summary dismissal) of older, sometimes less stylish, talents who did much to define the reinvention of DC Comics between 1956 and 1970.

Roughly of a generation with figures like Dick Giordano, Roy Thomas, and Herb Trimpe, Aparo would belong to a substantial, sometimes under-recognized, set of comics professionals who worked more in substance than flash and proved over decades their resistance to the kind of burnout that afflicted the sudden celebrities of the business during the sixties and early seventies. Wedged between talents barely old enough to have worked in the Golden Age - the Kanes and Kuberts - and the shining lights barely born in the Golden Age - the Adamses - Aparo would learn to straddle the gap between the generations of comics talent, helping to raise the standards for how a comics page would look without depending on either nostalgia or gimmickry, but solid, engaging visual treatments, to make the stories come to life.

Life Before Comics

Some talents originate in places one would not expect to provide a nest for the generation of comics artists or writers of note. For instance, Peter David came into writing comics from working in the accounting department for Marvel in a rather interesting variant of the normal career ladder. Aparo had spent some early years in other work altogether.

Aparo began working in the same sort of blue-collar jobs many folks resort to after high school and came, by the sixties, to work for an advertising agency, where he would perform some tasks in the pasteup process for ads as well as account-maintenance duties.

As he describes it, he had tried a number of times to enter the comics business, as long ago as the heyday of EC Comics. Routinely, he would submit samples, then never hear back from publishers, acquiring in the process the information that most were closed shops not considering new talent. However, during one summer vacation from his job at the ad agency, Aparo visited nearby Charlton Comics and submitted some pages, in the process impressing Dick Giordano, a figure who would bring many people into comics over his career.

Aparo began with part-time work for Charlton while he continued his straight day job, but eventually went to his Charlton employers and said he would work for them full-time if they would provide enough work for him. And from that day, Aparo would work for many years, across two publishers, in comics.

Charlton Days

His Charlton assignments included a bit of everything: a few issues of Bikini Luv, more than a few Many Ghosts of Doctor Graves, some Nightshade backup stories in Captain Atom prior to its cancellation, and anything the editors at Charlton would give him to do. Unlike many artists in higher-market-share companies of the day, Aparo provided pages complete with inks and lettering, very much a virtue at a publisher like Charlton that couldn't always afford to divide artists into specialties of penciler, inker, and letterer; and Aparo would continue this approach, as much as possible, when he ultimately moved to DC in the exodus of talent from Charlton to that company. He also established the habit of working from complete scripts, never taking a liking to working Marvel method.

Aparo's art on the Charlton Phantom title perhaps best served as the most enduring work he would do for that company. His style, from this early period of his art, would show the strengths that served him well in the height of his career, well able to combine the conventions of superhero comics with the kind of mood and tone appropriate for a character who bridged the gap between pulp heroes and superheroes. In this aspect, Aparo's work would demonstrate an ability that would serve well in later work on Batman-themed books, particularly after 1969, when the O'Neil / Adams interpretation of that character would also attempt to return him to his roots as a character that similarly straddled pulps and superhero comics.

If, in the sixties, we could define a means of producing comics as "Marvel Method," we might also consider another technique to exist that we could call "Charlton Method." Marvel Method, as generally described, involved a writer providing rough guidelines of story to an artist, who would then handle layouts and art, whereupon the writer would return to the story to provide the dialogue.Charlton Method, on the other hand worked differently. Imagine walking in the door with finished art (everything complete but coloring) and selling the story to Charlton, bypassing the process of running a story through writers, artists, inkers, and letterers.

Aparo caught his stride at Charlton, where such methods often provided the material for the variety of books - including but certainly not limited to superhero material - over the years. He therefore developed an independent approach, as far as art went, though, by his own confession, he never took particularly well to writing tasks and worked from complete scripts. Nonetheless, from blank boards to completed ink art, Aparo handled the entire process, and his best work seems to come from working this way. Indeed, his art tends to suffer somewhat at the hands of other inkers. No one seems to ink Aparo like Aparo.

DC and Brave and the Bold

Aparo received the assignment to do Brave & the Bold on something of an editorial whim. Having recently begun as artist on the Phantom Stranger series, the editorial side suggested that an upcoming Brave & the Bold which featured Batman and the Phantom Stranger would do well to have art by the regular Phantom Stranger artist. Thereafter, Brave & the Bold would run for years with Jim Aparo's art as a regular fixture, even through changes in writers.

Though Brave & the Bold doesn't enjoy the critical or comics-historical influence of Silver Age anchor pieces like Fantastic Four, one may note that Aparo's 100+ issue run on DC's premier team-up book could rank, on a lesser scale, with the Kirby run of Marvel Comics' flagship superhero title. Though not as integral to the story-creation process, and working on a sometimes-bimonthly title from which he enjoyed the occasional break, he defined a period such that the Haney-Aparo approach more or less defines pieces true to the Brave & the Bold concept.

By omission, Aparo's imprint stands out; in the same sense that attempts to rework the Fantastic Four concept without taking Kirby's imprint into account prescribe themselves to at least some degree of failure, so, too, did the recent resuscitation of Brave & the Bold as a team-up miniseries featuring Green Lantern and the Flash of the Silver Age. The title suggested the old book; the notion of a team-up miniseries reflected the conceptual root of the piece during Aparo's exceptional tenure; but, in the absence of Aparo, the book lacked the necessary feel to connect with its heritage.

Weird Adventure Comics

Of figures from the Silver Age or steeped in Silver Age traditions, only a few would possess the right touch to make the Spectre work visually. Names like Gene Colan, Neal Adams, and, of course, Jim Aparo come to mind here.

One might view this somewhat as a slanted reference, since the Weird Adventure Comics period of Spectre stories enjoyed a kind of shock value that would not become typical of superhero comics really until the eighties, when characters like the Punisher and Wolverine would represent a kind of "dispatch with extreme prejudice" attitude. Thus, in a period where Superman might still mouth platitudes about preserving the sanctity of life - and without irony or self-parody - the Spectre, for his part, would appear in stories where the hero did things like cut bad guys in half with a giant pair of scissors; turn a villain into wood and then cut him up with a rotary saw; turn a villain into glass; or even, in one instance, verify the imposture of a female significant other by means of a floating meat-cleaver that showed the impostor as an animated manikin.

Aparo's style, though well-suited to less moody pieces such as Brave & the Bold and Aquaman stories (in various titles), served well for a somewhat overstated back-to-the-basics approach to the Spectre unfiltered by a superheroic ethos that postdated the character.

Aparo and Aquaman

Again, though Aparo retained a distinct approach, he remains among the very few who had the right feel for the Silver Age Aquaman in the post-Fradon, pre-Crisis synthesis. Cardy, naturally enough, had such a feel, as would (later), the lamented Don Newton; however, to my eye, the best interpretations of Aquaman owed to Aparo's rendering.

Some artists have a flair for taking superheroes and making them their own, and this seems to describe well Aparo's handling of Aquaman, both in the self-named title and in features in anthology books like Adventure Comics, which for some years featured characters or franchises that either had lost their own books to cancellation or had not yet established themselves as robust enough for individual titles.

Much in the way that Joe Kubert would leave an imprint on Hawkman that would make his approach the character in many ways canonical, Aparo similarly shaped a treatment of Aquaman. Don Newton's treatment of Aquaman would respect this approach, and, notably, once death took Newton away from his role in comics, the next attempt at an Aquaman series would revert to Aparo.

Connections to the Batman Franchise

Aparo's name most readily evokes images of Batman, and this across many years and numerous titles, half of which still appear in print, another half of which mostly failed at or around 1985. Essentially, though other artists certainly handled the character, and some exceptionally well, we could consider the period after Batman and Robin separated as a team and before the recruitment of Jason Todd as a replacement Robin as the Age of Aparo, much in the sense that the late-fifties version of Batman might fairly bear the label "Age of Sprang." The Adams-Giordano interpretation involved too short, if glorious, a tenure; the Novick treatments would give due respect to the feel and concepts; but the Aparo Batman left an imprint on the memory in a way that no other could during the seventies and, somewhat, into the eighties.

Between Neal Adams and Frank Miller, a number of artists would leave behind tasty Batman-related pieces, but few would stamp a mark on the character that would cause readers to think of one of their pages at the mention of the character's name. Gene Colan, in the early eighties, did some excellent, though non-seminal, Batman work; Marshall Rogers and Terry Austin produced some very handsome pages well worthy of the occasional anthologization they receive; but to my eye, between these two bookends of the Batman concept, perhaps only Don Newton created such a moody, yet non-alienating, feel for the character.

Aparo recalls a number of changes of title, and, indeed, one can find him on the aforementioned variety of Batman titles, not necessarily concurrently, over the years between 1969 and 1989. During the seventies, however, the most readable Batman stories carried his credit, whether in Detective Comics, Batman, Brave & the Bold, or Batman and the Outsiders.

The Passing of Generations

By the mid-eighties, most of the titles Aparo had distinguished himself in would either have suffered cancellation or a shift in format that put them out of franchises to which he had established roots. Adventure Comics would become Adventures of Superman, one of a series of interlocking Superman books that would no longer feature anthology-style material (and, in the process, would eliminate a venue for DC to run stories in concepts that no longer could float ongoing series)1. Brave & the Bold, a work so intimately tied with Aparo that the imagination barely allows conceiving a meaningful version of the title in his absence, went under to cancellation in the great dying-off of team-up books in the early-to-mid eighties that would take out World's Finest, DC Comics Presents, Marvel Team-Up, and Marvel Two-in-One.

By this time, furthermore, DC would become somewhat hostile to tenured talent in the face of changes in the market that represented a dwindling circulation for many titles. DC's attempt to reinvent itself as Marvel during this period involved plum assignments for a number of Marvel Comics veterans such as Gerry Conway, Marv Wolfman, Roy Thomas, and George Perez. Talent with a grounding almost exclusively in 1970s-era DC work would not fare as well in work assignments, and the Bat-titles in particular, the remaining franchise where Aparo had roots, would tend to farm out work to high-in-the-pecking-order celebrity talent.

Furthermore, Aparo had moved on from Batman and the Outsiders during a fairly early period, with Alan Davis becoming the artist-of-record during the middle and late era of that title; but even another generation of talent handling that piece did not keep it afloat too long, since, once Batman departed from the title, it mainly featured third-string heroes. The two heroes who had once appeared in their own titles, Black Lightning and Metamorpho, had not done so for a particularly long time, meaning that book attempted to get by without any characters of independent appeal, an approach that stood in reverse to how DC had organized the Justice League.

Production Dogma and Its Consequences

Comics these days seems to suffer under notions that do not inherently improve the product, though the rationales behind a series of standards make great claims about intending just such an objective. For instance, the notion that every book must appear monthly axiomatically crowds out slower, sometimes more painstaking artists and increases the likelihood (and decreases the time required for) burnout. Aparo, having worked on alternating bimonthly titles during points in his career, could do an end run around this bit of production straightjacketing.

However, the assembly-line method represented a greater blow to him as an artist. Though existing specimens of his work suggest Aparo did best when given a script and allowed to work from blank pages to penciled, inked, and lettered work ready for the colorist and the copy camera, DC Comics frequently seems to have imposed upon him, especially as the eighties wore on, a style of working that limited him to the penciler's role and left others to ink and letter his works. Aparo's pages did not always prosper under the hand of other inkers. In Action Comics Weekly, for instance, Aparo somewhat withered, taking on an exaggerated, caricaturish resemblance to his self-inked style, such that the idiosyncrasies came through without the elegant use of blacks or the overall beauty of the rendering.

This assembly-line approach sometimes worked against the ability of artists to produce the pages they intended, as artists like Murphy Anderson sometimes recall, having sometimes constrained their all-around talents in order to fill in the roles that their employers found most useful as regular tasks. But the approach does injustice to particular creators, whose distinctive styles may thrive best under their own efforts as a finisher. Furthermore, sometimes one talent may enjoy a clarity of vision that vanishes when subjected to methods of committee production.

For whatever cause - and I mention lagging sales in addition to the ones I speculate about above - DC found less and less for this man to do, occasionally farming particular, and seemingly short-run, pieces to a proven work-horse who helped shape a success that would become the material of Silver Age nostalgia at the turn of the 21st century. While we on the consuming end can miss his work, even as we appreciate the luminaries of a decades-younger generation dominating the medium, we can also hope for the opportunity to see a new Aparo piece someday not too long in the future.

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Email the author at ouzomandias@mailexcite.com.

Column 262. Completed 06-JUN-2001.