Gil Kane is one of those artists who left his mark on comics in a most specific way. He developed a style quite unlike anyone else, immediately recognizable and full of a vibrant kinetic energy which rippled across the page and leaped off the page at the reader.
A working artist who served well and reliably on early DC efforts like Rex the Wonder Dog, The Atom and Green Lantern, he tumbled across the field to work for Marvel on Spider-Man, Captain Marvel and the Hulk among many others. He was the go-to cover for Marvel for many years. He worked for Tower Comics on the beloved THUNDER Agents. He was considered for a brief time to be the replacement artist for Barry Windsor Smith when he stepped away from Conan the Barbarian. I would have to imagine that notion came in no small part because of Blackmark.
Blackmark was the brawny and visceral hero of a distinctively "primitive world of the future" as presented in a proposed series of paperback comics scheduled to to be published by Bantam Books. Alas despite a scheme for three tomes, only one ever graced the stands and that one apparently failed to find the kinds of sales that Bantam craved or anticipated. Blackmark, not unlike its independent magazine cousin His Name Is...Savage disappeared after only a single issue. And that was it.
The came Roy Thomas, a booster for many artists and a friend and colleague of Gil Kane. The two seemed to find a wonderful balance working together and when Barry Smith wanted off his hit Conan the Barbarian, it was Gil Kane that Thomas considered as his replacement.
Kane did two issues of the regular Conan run and then had to beg off as Smith returned briefly. When Smith left again soon thereafter John Buscema (the original choice) was tapped and comics history was well and truly made.
Kane went on to become a durable part of the Bullpen and worked on a number of comics including the giant-size version of Conan which adapted Robert E. Howard's The Hour of the Dragon. When Thomas pushed out The Savage Sword of Conan in 1974 to take full advantage of the craving for more barbarians, he clearly was hungry for content which might fill the pages and Blackmark came to mind. The pages from the Bantam paperback were re-pasted for the new format and in the first four issues of the successful magazine Kane's singular swordsman appeared in the back pages, never rating a cover but getting several mentions.
Later still, the second unpublished Blackmark graphic novel was adapted from the format designed for publication in a Bantam paperback and published in its entirety by Marvel in Marvel Preview. This time Blackmark rated a cover appearance in a painting by an artist named Romas.
And that was it for the benighted saga of Blackmark for many years. Eventually however the folks at Fantagraphics saw fit to finally publish the material all together for the first time in a format which followed the pattern of the original Bantam books but somewhat larger to allow the artwork to be better appreciated. This volume from the early years of this century remains the definitive edition of Gil Kane's great epic, an epic which sadly like so many wonderful concepts of that era remained unfinished, though far from unsatisfying.
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I love Kane, but I think it would've helped to have a painted cover along the lines of Bantam's Doc Savage series. It's probable that the initial surge of Doc Savage and Conan in paperback sales had a lot to do with the packaging, and Kane's cover would've faded in the background next to other fantasy books. Bought my copy through the Monster Times.
ReplyDeleteI like that Bantam book a lot and maybe it's the lack of a painting which makes it stand out now, but you might well be right about the market at the time. Gil Kane was on the cutting edge of a lot of things in comics at that time, but the need to make dough as a regular for the traditional markets apparently kept him from really blazing through. He was perhaps a generation too early.
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