Mike Ploog came to my attention with his debut as artist on Marvel Spotlight's The Ghost Rider. His slick smoothly textured drawing was unlike anything I'd really seen at the time. Ploog was a devotee of the late great Will Eisner, but at the time, I had not really seen any of Eisner's best work and so I got a glimpse through his influence on Ploog. Ploog was the maven of horror for Marvel, drawing the earliest issues of Werewolf by Night, Ghost Rider, and The Monster of Frankenstein. It's hard to pick a fave, but if forced, I'd have to say his vintage images in the Frankenstein comic are the ones which linger most. Ploog went on to design for films, most notably The Lord of the Rings movie from Ralph Bashki as evidenced by the poster above.
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The production drawings he did for Bakshi's "Wizards" were so beautiful they were incorporated unchanged as a sort of still tapestry into the film. I think Starlin also worked on "Wizards", which came across as a bit garbled, but still visionary to me.
ReplyDeleteWizards was a lot of fun. I need to fish my copy out and give it another look. Thanks for the reminder.
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