“X-Men vs the Teen Titans. Interior splash page. Pencils/ [Walt Simonson]; inks/Terry Austin. Words/Chris Claremont. Lettering/Tom Orzechowski. 13.3 x 16.3. 1982.“
Just got done with a long week at work. (I mean, I work tomorrow and today, but the hard bit’s done). Walt Simonson just put this up on his twitter– boy, I like a Walt Simonson splash pages. A thing I like to do when I see older comic art is think about the era it was made in– and so figure 1982… There weren’t these big sci-fi spectacle movies back then. People had a couple Star War but Return of the Jedi (the third War that the Stars suffered) was a year away. The top movie that year was ET, but second highest movie? Rocky 2. Third highest? On Golden Pond! Fifth highest? Porky’s!!! Fifteenth highest? Tootsie. Twenty-first highest? The Toy.
It was a different world with a different relationship with sci-fi, fantasy, big-imagery. If you wanted to see that stuff, you plonked down 25 cents… But if you plonked down your 25 cents for a Walt Simonson comic? I mean, look at that guy go! You get every character you like, plus a giant monster (well that’s Chameleon or whatever his name is), plus just such a classy drawing of a city underneath. That is a class city shot to me anyways.
Or check out one of his Star War splash pages:
That’s in 1981. The third highest grossing movie in 1981? Dolly Parton and Jane Fonda’s Nine to Five. Which is a banger movie, but like. The ninth highest? Alan Alda’s comedy hit The Four Seasons. Imagine being a kid, and the world’s just like “Oh well I guess there’s an A-Team on Friday” or whatever it was like back then, and then just being able to put down a QUARTER and that was how you got to be in outer space having space battles. That’s what comics got to do…
Big imagery was just rare. But you could just put down a quarter, and watch a movie bigger than anything that’d be in your theaters– and Simonson would put you in that world. The architecture made sense. He wouldn’t skimp on the panels, layouts, story, incident, because that was back when you had to tell a story in a comic book. (And like Simonson’s continued to be one of my favorite guys from that perspective, for other reasons– like how present he feels…? i don’t know, i’m not in the mood to talk about that). But within the structure of Old Comics, he’d really detail out an entire world filled with STUFF (buildings, ships, Viking God cities, the entirety of NYC– look at those buildings!!!, whatever) and put the reader right in the best place to look at it. Other people had people jumping around and gesturing better– a Gil Kane, say, but Simonson’s comics had just the coolest stuff in ‘em.
I hate that saying that “oh with comics you don’t need a big budget to do big images, you just get some artist and you exploit them as hard as possible.” Like, I just think it’s a lame way to think about things. But.
Not an artist always served by his colors though– at least, I like Star Slammers as much as the next guy but man, I don’t know about those colors (or how I remember ‘em– maybe my memory’s imperfect). I kinda think the colors on Star Slammers or that first wave of graphic novels are, like, trying to be art whereas the comic coloring of the era that book came out in would’ve meant more to me, in placing that book years/decades later in a time and a place (which I guess is an argument that no longer makes sense now that we live in the Anything Possible era of comic coloring but). Like if I read an 80′s comic, I want it to be Glynis Oliver 80′s comic, you know? I don’t want it to be an 80′s comic that’s trying to look like a 90′s comics or a 00′s comic…? I don’t know– that’s not very coherent I guess…
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