Dan Spiegle is not one of those artists I loved in real time. Oh I appreciated his work when I found it, almost exclusively in Gold Key and Whitman comics where he gave all the characters a handsome gloss. He was the regular artist on Korak, Son of Tarzan and offered a nifty counterpoint to Russ Manning's handsome take on the Ape Man, and Space Family Robinson (the comic which inspired Lost in Space). My real appreciation for Spiegle came some years later when Mark Evanier turned to him time and again to illustrate his comic stories, especially the spin-off of DNAgnents -- Eclipse's Crossfire. There was a lot of Indy stuff on the marketplace at the time with enthusiastic but sometimes suspect art, and it was refreshing indeed to find one of those books which had the cool reliable professionalism that Dan Spiegle always (and I do mean"always") delivered. Whether he was drawing Blackhawk and Nemesis for DC or Space Ghost for Gold Key (my very first unconfirmed Spiegle was almost certainly his work on the Space Ghost Big-Little Book), Speigle's work was light and clean and easy to read. He told stories, not just made pretty pictures. Years later I learned that Spiegle had been the regular artist on Hopalong Cassidy for many years. He was just what you wanted in a professional comic book artist, he was a talent you could build a line around.
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I had the same experience. Crossfire was the series that made me really appreciate Spiegle's work.
ReplyDeleteGuys as good as Spiegle get overlooked because they are so rock solid consistent and they don't do hyperbolic stuff, they just crank out stories.
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