Hercules Unbound #4, May 1976 (Pencils by Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez)
Gerry Conway and Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez — an artist’s artist if there ever was one — launched Hercules Unbound in 1975. But the real news was that Wally Wood would be inking the book.
Wally’s lush art had graced just a handful of DC superhero titles in the late ‘60s, when I had first started actively reading comics. My first exposure to his stellar inking was likely in 1968’s Captain Action. (He also penciled issue #1 of that short-lived series.)
By the time he returned to DC in the mid ‘70s, I was not only familiar with much of his oeuvre (EC, Marvel, Warren, Tower, etc.), I was pretty much obsessed with his art, as both penciller and inker.
If his work at DC was going to be inking only, so be it, because typically it didn’t matter who was penciling — Wood’s dramatic and distinctive inks make everything look mostly like… Wood. That includes hall-of-fame stylists like Steve Ditko and Gil Kane. And frankly, some of those artists’ styles were more fluid and dynamic than Wally’s to begin with.
This page is no exception, featuring dynamic action and storytelling by Garcia-Lopez, who had only recently broken into DC, and would rapidly become one of the industry’s most respected artists. At this point in the series, the art team was most definitely firing on all cylinders.
It did not matter that I wasn’t quite sure how Hercules fit into the greater DC universe, or even if he did. I was going to be saving a small piece of my comics’ budget for Hercules Unbound.
Like they say in the comics: To be continued…
