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Saturday, July 30, 2005

Invaders #5 - Cover

Ah, the Invaders defending a homefront parade from the menace of a giant Red Skull. There's an image for you. It's like a combination of a monster cover and a super-hero cover. I know the layouts for these covers were done in New York (by Marie Severin for this one, I'm pretty sure. I think her layout ran in ALTER EGO a while back), but she really knew how to play to Kirby's strengths with them.

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Joe Sinnott inks.

Published 1976

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

One thing I wonder about this cover: where in the world is Bucky leaping to? There's nothing underneath him but a marching band about eight stories below!

bob said...

yeah, that Bucky. The surprise isn't that he died, it's that he lasted as long as he did.

Axel M. Gruner said...

The other surprise is that noone ever noticed that little army camp mascot brat named Bucky going AWOL every time that little superheroe sidekick brat named Bucky appeared.
Dumb luck, or just dumb?

kirkm5computer001abc said...

I love this series. I only wish that Kirby had the art chores in the Invaders series. Frank Robbins' interior art reminded me of Milton Caniff from Steve Canyon...if Milton drew super-heros of course.

Robbins was an aquired taste as artist and a lot of fans wrote in not liking the art. However I have grown to like his style.

When I was a kid a foolishly believed that anyone could draw like Kirby. I thought that Kirby just recklessly drew the way he did because he loved the cartoony style of art. I found myself returning to read his books all the time because I found them so much more interesting than the "realistic" illustrators of the time.

Neal Adams was a favorite when I was a kid and I converted to a Kirby fan because realistic art is boring in the super hero genre.

You can only see so many camera angles where your looking up the hero's nose. The realism in Neal Adams work made him notoriously late for deadlines.

As a consequence you never saw a 100 issue run of Adams on the Avengers because you can't sustain that realism on a monthly basis.

Anonymous said...

I would have loved to see Kirby on Invaders as well, but, although I found Robbins' work quirky, I dod like it more than many others did at the time.

Adams is a talented artist and I like much of his early work, but Kirby still screams comics to me. Kirby has, and always will be, one of the best storytellers the medium ever had.

Nick Caputo

Anonymous said...

>. I only wish that Kirby had the art chores in the Invaders series.

Agreed. That would have been awesome! Kirby preferred not to work with other writers, though.

>Frank Robbins'interior art reminded me of Milton Caniff from Steve Canyon...if Milton drew superheroes of course.

Robbins’ work was very much in the “Caniff School”, along with other comic strip and comic book artists like Lee Elias. Robbins’ Johnny Hazard strip, which he drew from 1944 till 1977 is reminiscent of Steve Canyon, with its film noir atmosphere and dark, inky shadows. The writing probably isn’t as good as Caniff’s, but cartoonist Darwyn Cooke made the argument in an interview recently that, in many ways, Robbins was the better artist. Although I love Caniff, I’m inclined to agree.

>Robbins was an aquired taste as artist and a lot of fans wrote in not liking the art. However I have grown to like his style.

I didn’t mind Robbins’ art when I was a kid, but now he’s one of my favorites – especially when he inked his own work (such as in DC’s Shadow and Plop), or was inked by an inker in tune with his style (such as Frank Springer). In my humble opinion, Colletta ruined Robbins’ art on The Invaders (just as he ruined Kirby's work). Their styles were like oil and water.

>and I converted to a Kirby fan because realistic art is boring in the super hero genre.

Agreed. Cartoony beats realism in superhero comics any day of the week. I enjoy cartoonists who create worlds on the page that can only exist in comic books – not cartoonists whose work looks like they’re tracing photographs. That’s why I’m glad to see the return of “cartoony” in the work of cartoonists like Bruce Timm and Darwyn Cooke.

kirkm5computer001abc said...

I just read Greg Cox's new Fantastic Four novel called "War Zone" and I couldn't help think what might have been if Kirby were drawing the novel as a comic. For my review check out my Blog called "Warp to the Future" on this Blogger channel.

Anonymous said...

This is one of my all-time favourite covers, with the imposing image of the Red Skull; a great combination between Kirby and Sinnott. Pity Joe didn't ink more of the King's work in the 70s.

The cover really puts the interior art (Buckler/Mooney) to shame.

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