Perfect Hulk art team on a pretty perfect Incredible Hulk page.
Ol’ greenskin knows that somewhere in Hank Pym’s laboratory — and Bruce Banner’s brain — hides the secret to shrinking back down to the microverse.
Why is this so important? I’m glad you asked. Our poor Hulk is lovesick and desperate to reunite with his beautiful Jarella.
Hulk in very panel: Raging, smashing, and blinded by love — and the self-awareness that he doesn’t retain enough of Banner’s smarts to work through it.
Legendary artist Steve Ditko delivers a great page in this mid-70s “EC-style” story of murder and comeuppance. (And puzzled fish. Don’t forget the puzzled fish.)
Ditko’s work during this period at Charlton tends to be a bit all over the map in terms of draftsmanship and level detail, but this story is a fine example of his more polished work from the era.
(For the record, even lesser Ditko stories are still better than 80-90 percent of the rest of industry’s output in that timeframe, especially at secondary companies.)
From a rights and commercial standpoint, it’s likely that this Ditko material will never officially be collected into trades. Some of it can be found on the Internet, and fortunately, the Charlton horror comics themselves are typically very inexpensive in lesser condition.
In addition to the original publication, “The Drowned Girl” was also reprinted in an “all-water” horror-themed comic a few years later.
Summer came very late to the Southern California Coast this year, so in honor of the warm weather and cool surf, we’ll stay with The Human Torch and The Sub-Mariner for a few more posts.
This great battle page, penciled by Marie Severin, and inked by Jim Mooney, features Sub-Mariner vs. the contemporary Human Torch, Johnny Storm. This a feud that started in Fantastic Four #4 in 1962 (Torch is the one who discovers an amnesiac Namor living in NYC) and continued intermittently through the silver and bronze ages.
Along for the fun this time is the giant sea-beast Krago, woken from his slumber by Subby’s enemies to wreak havoc among us, and to have Namor blamed. Krago is apparently NOT related to Giganto, another giant sea-beast Namor himself brought along in FF #4. How many species of giant sea creatures are there anyway? And to think I was worried about the occasional shark.
What can you say about the late great Marie Severin, easily one of the most versatile talents to ever work in comics? Penciller, inker, colorist, occasional letterer, caricaturist, production artist, cover designer, satirist… and so on. Hands down, an amazing career, made even more so because she needed to make her bones — more than once — in a thoroughly male-dominated industry.
Marie passed away almost exactly a year ago, and many well-written tributes speak to the scope of her career: Marvel.com, The Comics Journal, and the New York Times all provide good starting points to this remarkable creator.
