Friday, December 30, 2011
Getting Ahead!
This ad made me laugh when I stumbled across it the other day. What a crass and cruel joke and what a totally appropriate gag for roughhouse comic characters like Conan and Red Sonja.
The artwork here is signed "Javinal" and I assume that is Frederico Javinal, an artist from the Phillipines. I can find very little about Javinal aside from this brief biography and this slightly larger one.
I did find this lovely montage shot featuring Captain America and Kid Colt (?) among others. Off-model renderings of classic heroes really makes you look at them in fresh ways, like this illustration by Franc Reyes.
Javinal appears to have been an exceedingly competent comics artist, perhaps deserving of more attention.
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All the Marvel black & white magazines featured single page artwork by people not normally associated with those characters (or even Marvel).
ReplyDeleteUsually they were used as inside cover, contents page or article illustrations.
I theorize they were commissioned "tryout" pieces for those characters and Marvel was recouping costs by using them in this manner.
(DC and Warren did the same thing.)
Perhaps the most famous example of this was Berni Wrightson's tryout piece for DC's 1970s The Shadow, which ended up as a house ad that ran everywhere... http://media.photobucket.com/image/recent/baseballguru/the%2520shadow/wrightson_shadow_ad.jpg
Berni DID work on The Shadow, but as an inker over Mike Kaluta's pencils.
That's a likely explanation. I'm sure there were lots of art pieces floating around the Bullpen for sundry uses.
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