Greg Goldstein's Comic Art Gallery
Panels and Pages… Art and Artists… Creators and Conventions… Musings and Memories…
Action Comics # 855, October 2007
Geoff Johns, Richard Donner and Eric Powell creating a multi-part Bizarro story?
Sign me up.
Spoiler alert: It’s absolutely terrific — fun and affectionate — start to finish. Powell knocks the art out of the park. Many mainstream superhero readers tracked down Powell’s Goon series after they saw this.
You can bet the farm — Kent’s or otherwise — on that.
One final time — Happy Halloween, 2024!
Superman #200, October 1967
This art is from Wayne Boring’s final new story for DC comics for more than 20 years.
Boring, one of Superman’s truly legendary artists, was part of a group of creators that asked for pay rate increases, benefits and other employment improvements. So, naturally, DC fired them all.
It’s an oddball imaginary story with the end spoiler right there on the (Curt Swan) cover for kids like me to see. I had only been reading Superman comics for a short while, but I knew his Kryptonian origin by heart from TV and other media. So, I was intrigued by this alternative vision of The Superman legend.
I acquired this page whenI first started collecting art again about 15 years ago, and I haven’t seen one since.
Action Comics #407, December 1971
I rarely get into bidding wars over a specific piece of art. As a well-know art dealer intones: “There’s always more art.”
This time, though, I got carried away.
Superman in space. Curt Swan and Murphy Anderson. Superman in every panel. A title page. An original Superman logo. And my peak era of buying comics from newsstands (late Silver Age, early Bronze age) without the benefit of comics conventions.
That is a lot of checkboxes. So, like I said, I got carried away.
Overpaid — but worth it.
Plus — and I love this — it has a Looney Tunes type joke in the monolugue. He made a wrong left turn a million miles ago? Seriously?
Action Comics #406, November 1971
Our third annual Halloween tribute continues now through October 31.
Remember that time hat Superman lost his head?
You don’t?
I do, and I was pleased to see this page come up at auction earlier this year.
I was mostly done with the Superman Family by the time this issue appeared in 1971, but occasionally something off the wall (pun NOT intended — this time, anyway) would grab my attention, and this was one of those issues.
It’s rare (although not impossible) to find a title page that has such a literal cover interpretation, and of course the fact that it was drawn by the great Superman art team of Curt Swan and Murphy Anderson is a giant selling point for me.
Also rare: The cover is taken from the back-up story instead of the main feature. Obviously, someone at DC knew how to grab attention — at least mine, anyway.
Fun fact: On both Superman stories in this issue, the “Swanderson” art team gets top billing in the credits. They deserved it, as the art was light years ahead of the story material.)
Superman Daily Strip, September 29, 1965
Classic Superman artist Wayne Boring provides us with an excellent and rare daily strip at the end of Superman’s 27-year newspaper run.
The excellence is obvious; Superman uses three different super powers in each of the three panels.
Rare because, well, pretty much the same reason: Many, many strips from this period only feature Clark, Lois or other characters in “civilian” garb, with soap opera style plots and stories. In other words, there are many strips where Superman is nowhere to be found.
In fact, in the 80s, Boring would often Remarque those “plain” originals with a Superman figure to make them more desirable in the collectors market.
But of course, no need to add an “extra” Superman here. He’s doing just fine in this good-looking example.
We managed to collect most of the Superman strips at IDW and LOAC, but couldn’t find any collectors with complete runs from the earliest silver age period. (Late 50s.) That era of strips includes the introduction of a Brainiac prototype (“Romado”) drawn by the great Curt Swan.
Strange Sports #3, February 1974
Today is the 100th birthday of the late, great Curt Swan, one of DC’s all-time storytellers. And while the internet is blowing up with great Swan Superman images, (and there are literally thousands of those) let’s instead pull this splash out of left field. (Ouch, wrong sport.)
It’s a Hall of Fame page from this fun 70s series, with story by Frank Robbins, inks by Dick Giordano and the whole shebang edited by Julie Schwartz.
Merlin? King Arthur? Knights playing football against contemporary players? Somehow the whole thing made perfect sense — to me, at least.
Thanks for all the magic Curt — here and everywhere else.
