Greg Goldstein's Comic Art Gallery
Panels and Pages… Art and Artists… Creators and Conventions… Musings and Memories…
Star Wars: Crimson Empire #1, December 1997
Paul Gulacy and P. Craig Russell provide creative storytelling (I love the top sequence) and excellent draftsmanship (of course) for the 1997 Dark Horse Series, Crimson Empire.
This is one of my favorite pages in the first issue, with Darth Vader landing and bowing before his master, The Emperor.
In other words, what’s not to like?
Classic. Just classic.
James Bond 007: Serpent’s Tooth #2, August 1992
Until the last few years, James Bond’s appearances in comic books are rare. Added all together prior to 2016, they most definitely would not fill an omnibus.
Rights issues are always tricky with this franchise; although Eon Productions —and its merchandising arm, Danjaq — manages film rights, the literary property itself remains controlled by the Ian Fleming Estate.
Which explains why this run at Dark Horse features a James Bond who doesn’t in fact look like any other Bond we’ve seen previously. In fact, here he looks a little bit like — Paul Gulacy.
Regardless, It’s great Gulacy page from a good-looking miniseries; even if this specific example looks like it would be more at home in an Indiana Jones comic book.
GI Joe Special Missions #4, June 2013
When I was a kid, G.I. Joe never looked like this.
Of course, there’s an easy explanation for that. I grew up with the original Joe’s somewhat vanilla representations of America’s fighting forces. I loved them, as did most of my friends, but character development was not in the 60s line-up.
Characters like “bad girl” Baroness here were the result of Hasbro’s re-introduction and revamp of the brand in 1982. Marvel Comics was essentially paid to create colorful heroes and even more colorful bad guys. And they delivered, mainly with the creativity and guidance of writer Larry Hama.
The rest, as they say (Ok, I say it a lot) is history.
IDW became publisher of record shortly after I cane on board in 2008, and has had some terrific success with various iterations during the last dozen years.
This Special Missions series is a fine example, with script by Chuck Dixon and terrific visual storytelling by fan favorite Paul Gulacy.
I acquired a few pages from this series, including this dynamic splash, but another one of these pages comes with a unusual annecdote, which I will share down the road. (I’d bet you can’t wait, but I’d lose.)
And so, 2020 finally comes to an end. Whew. Here’s looking forward to a much better 2021. We will be back on Thursday, January 7, with a special year-opening series on… well… that will be telling. See you soon, and thanks again for visiting.
Master of Kung Fu #20, September 1974
By now, we should be in the next phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but unfortunately, we have a six-month delay. So, for the first time in a dozen years, no Marvel film to launch the summer movie-going season. But, we won’t let that delay slow us down here — this week, we’re looking at some comics art related to the next three scheduled films.
Marvel’s ability to spot trends, and capitalize on them, definitely helped their their 1960s rise from second (more like fifth) banana to publishing powerhouse in the 60s and 70s.
Case in point: Martial arts and specifically “Kung-Fu.”. First flooding film houses, and then television, the craze rapidly spread through pop-culture in the early 1970s. Bruce Lee — and dozens of imitators — had clearly caught the public’s imagination.
Marvel quickly launched three genre series in late 1973 and early 1974. First up was Shang-Chi, originally by Steve Englehart and Jim Starlin, and shortly thereafter by Doug Moench and Paul Gulacy.
Shang-Chi’s backstory was intriguing — in the comics, he’s the son of Dr. Fu Manchu, famed villain from the Sax Rohmer novels. This plot detail, ultimately a rights issue, helped derail Marvel from reprinting the series for more than 40 years.
And, it’s been changed apparently for the Shang-Chi film now scheduled for May, 2021. He’s re-written now as the son of the Mandarin, an early Marvel (Iron Man) mastermind who was “impersonated” in Iron Man 3. We will see how that plays out.
As for this page itself: Shang- Chi barely makes an “appearance”, but so what? It’s a cool example of Gulacy’s Steranko-influenced storytelling.
And, as for the criticism that perhaps Gulacy’s style was too influenced by Jim Steranko in these early issues? I say, so what to that too. Jim had already bowed out of comic book stories by then, and if you liked his work, this was possibly the next best thing.
