Panels and Pages… Art and Artists… Creators and Conventions… Musings and Memories…
Author: Greg Goldstein
Greg Goldstein is a veteran publishing and media executive; most recently, he was the Chief Operating Officer, President and Publisher of IDW Publishing, managing all aspects of the company’s book and games business from 2008 to 2019.
Throughout his career, Greg has developed creative and profitable publishing programs for dozens of the world’s best-known entertainment brands including Star Wars, Transformers, Star Trek, James Bond, TMNT, Spider-Man, Batman and Godzilla.
In 2013, Greg led IDW’s acquisition of Top Shelf, an independent publisher best known for Congressman John Lewis’ March trilogy, which has become the most lauded non-fiction graphic novel series in the history of the medium.
In 2011, Greg won an Eisner award for his editing on the first-ever collection of Bob Montana’s Archie newspaper comic strips. (Published under IDW’s Library of American Comics imprint.)
Prior to joining IDW, Greg was VP of Entertainment and Gaming for Upper Deck, responsible for the company’s blockbuster slate of games, including Yu-Gi-Oh, World of Warcraft and The VS Superhero system. During his tenure, he created Marvel Ultimate Battles, the first-ever trading card game that focused exclusively on Marvel’s popular mass media characters.
As VP of Brand Development for Activision from 2000-2002, Greg established strategic partnerships with the largest Hollywood studios, and worked closely with Marvel Entertainment to successfully develop Spider-man into one of the biggest blockbuster licensed videogame brands in interactive history.
Greg’s career has also included a successful stint at Topps, where he helped launch and manage Topps Comics in the mid 1990s.
Additionally, Greg serves as an adviser for to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (CBDLF). He is also a frequent guest lecturer at San Diego Sate University and has presented at dozens of panels and conferences throughout the US.
He is also a well-known collector of original comic book art and rues the day he sold his collection the first time around in the late 1990s.
Man-Thing (Seriously, what kind of drugs to you take to come up with a name like that?) makes his first color comic book appearance in this terrific Ka-Zar story illustrated primarily by John Buscema.
Part of the story was slated to appear in the B&W Savage Tales #2 which did not see the light of day, so it was cleverly re-worked here. Because of the re-mixing, credits on this issue read like an all-star line-up, and include Buscema, Neal Adams, John Romita and Dan Adkins.
Writer Roy Thomas somehow made sense of it all, creating the framing story around Len Wein’s original tale.
Bonus: Man -Thing’s first overall appearance in Savage Tales #1 includes this glorious splash (below) by Gray Morrow.
Red Sonja and Conan together again, as they say, on this great cover by my pal, the very talented Sean Chen.
That’s it. That’s the post.
Red Sonja made her first appearance in Conan #23, and appeared on the cover one month later in issue #24. Both issues feature glorious art by the legendary Barry Windsor Smith.
Greetings from WonderCon, 2023. One of my favorite things about the event is that the unique plaza area in front of the Anaheim Convention Center is a perfect place for cosplay pics — and no terrible convention lighting!
Unused Cover,Sword of Red Sonja: Doom of the Gods #1, October 2007
In an age of variant covers, exclusive covers, incentive covers, et al, sometimes a cover simply gets lost in shuffle.
It happens. (Take it from a former publisher. It definitely happens.)
Case in point: This stunning Red Sonja cover art was scheduled for Sword of Red Sonja: Doom of the Gods #1, got shuffled around and by the time the mini-series was complete, had not been published. I’m sure it didn’t help that another artist turned in a similar composition for a later issue.
I had a chance to catch up with Aaron last month and he thinks it may have appeared in a later trade collection or elsewhere at some point, but he couldn’t swear to it. And neither one of us could find it.
So, unpublished until we hear further. (Bonus points for the Marvel cover paper — all covers look better on that board, even if they weren’t actually produced by Marvel.)
All four published Lopresti covers from the original mini-series.
It took me a while to acquire a piece of art from his run on the famed female barbarian, but I ended up with a cool one.
To this day, the wildest convention events I have ever personally witnessed were the live performances featuring Red Sonja (Wendy Pini, Linda Behrle, and others) and Frank Thorne playing a wizard: “Sonja and the Wizard.”
They called themselves the “The Hyborian Players.”
It was indeed the 70s. Trippy, dude. Trippy.
Famed talk show host Mike Douglas with Phil Seuling, Wendy Pini as Red Sonja and actor Jamie Farr, July 1977
Reed Crandall pencils and inks a terrific page from a Crusades story about honor and betrayal. It appears in one of EC’s final comic books before the company completely exited the 10-cent color periodical business.
The Comics Code may have taken some of the teeth out of the storytelling of EC’s New Direction titles,
Ring of the Nibelung #2, (The Valkyrie), February 1990
Gil Kane tackles Richard Wagner’s The Ring of The Nibelung opera series (adapted here by Roy Thomas) with dramatic results.
It’s a prestige format series, so Gil employs a large art format, and, unlike the majority of his DC work from this period, it’s primarily pen and ink, as opposed to marker. Therefore, the pages — pretty much all terrific — are collectible and displayable without worrying about the art fading to nothingness.
(Ask anyone — myself included — who has owned a page from either Sword of the Atom mini-series and they can explain further.)
What would Gil himself say about this dynamic page? I’m not exactly sure, but it would begin this way:
Mike Machlan adds his own flavor to the classic match-up of The Avengers vs. the Space Phantom (Avengers #2) in this published pin-up from Marvel fanfare #41. Mike did a few of these classic interpretations as a portfolio in this issue, each with a different inker. (John Beatty provides finishes here.)
I’ve always enjoyed Machlan’s art. I understand that health reasons cut his career short, which, goes without saying, is a terrible shame.
Separately, I’ve gone on record saying that the first four issues of the Avengers are the craziest (in a positive way) and most colorful start to any series in the Silver Age — if not ever:
Issue #1 —The Avengers (Ant-man, Wasp, Thor Iron Man, Hulk) form to fight Loki, and despite Hulk’s reticence they agree to become a team. Wasp provides the name “Avengers.”
Issue #2 — Ant-Man is now Giant-Man, and this time the Space Phantom (instead of Loki) manipulates the Hulk (and the rest of the group) — and after a big fight, ol’ greenskin gets angry and runs-off.
Issue #3 – The remaining Avengers chase after the Hulk and run into the Namor the Sub-Mariner along the way. Iron Man wears new armor, everyone gets into a big fight, and the Hulk runs off. Again. Namor escapes to the sea. Cameos by Spider-man, The X-Men and The Fantastic Four.
Issue #4 — Namor, now really, really angry, starts hurling some icebergs around, and it turns out Captain America is frozen in one of them, although Subby swims off before he can discover that. The Avengers revive Cap (good thing they have a submarine), and after they tussle, and he comprehends he’s been in suspended animation for 20 years, he joins them.
It’s the Avengers vs. the Destroyer in this great action page from the first issue of the underrated reboot of the Thor mythos. Dan Jurgens wrote the series and John Romita Jr. and Klaus Janson provided the visual storytelling for the launch.
Cool bonus feature: Both artists signed the page the year the issue was published.
Marvel definitely floundered after the Image exodus in 1991, but by the late 90s stated putting the comic book pieces back together as evidenced here and in the launch of the Marvel Knights imprint, produced by Joe Quesada and Jimmy Palmiotti. The Ultimate universe came along a few years later, and the rest, as they say is history.
Commission, All-Star Squadron #1 Mash-up with Avengers #150 and #151, 2007
Bob Layton has some fun reimagining the cover of DC’s All-Star Squadron #1 (Rich Buckler, artist) as an Avengers “changing of the guard” issue.
Also fun — Bob uses the trade dress for issue #150 (1976) of the Avengers own comic book, a fill in issue that primarily features a reprint of the first major line-up change in issue #16. The actual line-up changes in #151.
It was clearly all meant to be a single story in #150, but… the dreaded deadline of doom strikes again.
