I've had this odd habit lately of preparing social media cover photos shortly before a related sad turn of events. The past few nights I've been reading the earliest Fantastic Four issues (scanned from the original comics, as available in PDFs on now out-of-print DVDs which Marvel licensed to a third party). Tonight/this morning I had read #5 and just a few pages into #6 I stopped to pull out an image of Doctor Doom for my profile pic and a panel of Doom and the Sub-Mariner to use as my cover photo. Anyway, reading these old comics from the original printing, I have noticed that the line quality is usually better partly because when these things get reprinted or digitized nowadays, they get recolored and as part of that process the line quality often degrades. I also keep being taken aback by how artful I find the coloring. And I keep going to check each issue over at marvel dot wikia dot com (also to see who inked 'em) and seeing every issue was colored by Stan Goldberg. And I've been comparing to later collected re-colored editions, and really just marveling at how much more creative and appropriate I find the coloring choices and technique (and printing process) of the originals. It does seem Goldberg would use large areas of single color a lot, but it looked good. (Deadlines, after all. And I can't imagine the pay was too high. And, a lot of time, those swaths of blue just work…) I am a big admirer of the Marvel comics from the sixties, primarily because of the brilliance of Jack Kirby, the penciler and plotter of these books. For my aesthetic sensibilities, there are superhero comics, and then there's Jack Kirby. The guy was an artist, and a creative genius. (There have certainly been other other great talents in the field too, I ain't saying otherwise.) I also find some value in Stan Lee's amusing dialogue. So I can't say I ever really took particular note of Stan Goldberg, though I've long been aware that I prefer the coloring style of the original comics to the much more readily available reprints. I did note the names of the colorists when I was reading comics as a kid - who were credited by that time. And I have become familiar reading up on comics history with the names of some of the earlier ones, such as Goldberg. But the last few nights specifically, I've thought- this guy's a big part of how these books look, hats off to him. Apparently Goldberg did a vast amount of early Marvel color work. Per his Wikipedia page "I was doing the initial coloring on all those books; I was creating the color schemes on all those characters." Well, after getting back to and finishing #6 I got online and by chance saw Goldberg has died, age 82. His coloring brings so much to these old comics that I just happened to be reading right now, and I was just thinking how glad I am to have these DVDs of PDFs to read, when I do find time to read these old comics (usually at like 2AM). I wouldn't be nearly as satisfied having to settle for recolored reprints. To me, recolored versions are merely a substitute for the real thing. And that's just a small portion of his comics work. He was also an illustrator, primarily of humorous comics. Anyway, here's the panel I had cropped for use as my cover photo, scanned from original comic as colored by the recently departed Mr. Stan Goldberg, who wielded the old four-color process to help bring something pretty new and exciting to life.
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| Victor has a beverage while Namor rests his right foot. A few pages later Namor realizes that Doom is, indeed, a jackal. |
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