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John Buscema's Work on Dell Four Colour
Alessandro Bottero:
thanks jim.
Buscema's western in The Westerner (orbit) is real good, but since in Italy Buscema is know for his Conan, Avengers and "marvel post-1960" works, something like The Vikings, or Simbad, has a bigger appeal.
anyway all the stories sci-fi and horror for Adventures into the Unknown and Forbidden Worlds are real good.
This "Buscema topic" is the "living proof" of my theory: Golden Age comics is full of hidden gems. So far (i'm speaking for Italian comic book readers) Golden Age was Timely-Marvel and National-DC Comics, and nothing else, because we had an italian translation of SOME of the Captain America, Superman, Batman Golden Age stories.
but outside this almost no one knows anything at all about Quality, Fiction house, Fox, Dell, Fawcett, and so on.
why? Because no one translated these stories in Italy. no one read them, no one know they exsist. (i'm speakling for the "majority". there are few good critics wich know this field)
JVJ (RIP):
I like his romance and the Wanted art from Orbit, too, Allesandro,
and he actually did a few freelance jobs for Atlas in the early '50s and for Pre-Marvel in 1959-60.
His ACG stuff IS great and very under-promoted and -appreciated.
What is hard for me to understand is how ANYBODY in this day and age can NOT know about all of these GA companies. There is DCM, GAC, reprint books, articles, Alter Ego, the Price Guide, and so much more that for any fans not to know about GA companies besides Marvel and DC seems to me to be a deliberate kind of ignorance.
Those Italian fans and everyone else should know by now that there are many GA great artists and companies and comics out there. If they don't, then we as comic book historians and fans have done a pretty lousy job of promoting them, and the fans haven't been paying much attention, for the last forty years.
Peace, Jim (|:{>
John C:
That's the same old discussion, isn't it, Jim? If you don't already know what you're looking for, if you don't even know there's something TO look for, how do you find it?
Even with a physical source like Alter Ego, you need to know that it exists and has value. Prior to hearing about this run (and leading with Infinity, Inc., helped), I had never considered "fanzines" to be worth any more than the hand-stapled mimeographed conspiracy theory 'zines I used to see in low-rent shops back in the '80s.
Plus, look at it this way: How many television or radio shows have you enjoyed where you can name everybody who ever worked on the project, their source material, and so forth? Most are content to merely consume.
JVJ (RIP):
There is truth in what you say, John,
and the challenge has ALWAYS been WHERE to collate the data from millions of man-hours of research so that it IS available? Jerry Bails and Hames Ware's Who's Who of American Comic Books in the early '70s was a start. Then with the advent of the Internet and the on-line WW version in 1999, it's been relatively easy to get at an overview of any artists' GA career. When you add in Google, Wikipedia, and the GCD, it's even more accessible. All you have to do is ASK a question.
Perhaps it's the unquestioned life of most fans that bothers me. Because, if you liked a John Buscema Conan story, it bewilders me that you wouldn't at least do a Google search on him or look him up in Wikipedia. There you would discover at least a capsule history of his career. Go down to "References" and you'd "discover" the Grand Comics Database. All it takes is wanting to know.
The same can be said of TV and radio these days. If I WANTED to know the cast and credits, they are easily discoverable. One would expect that the desire to get more of a good thing (i.e. John Buscema art) would lead people to these resources. According to Allessandro, it hasn't, and I find that discouraging - as I've spent the last 40 years of my life trying to encourage just that.
Peace, Jim (|:{>
John C:
Well, consider them "casual fans," rather than fanatics. Or fans of the "literature" over the "art," which is a camp I'm mostly in. I enjoy the books, but...usually don't care who the people are behind them, or at least, not in relation to the comic itself. Honestly, I was probably reading comics for almost fifteen years before realizing that the names on the splash page might have some utility, and I was still baffled when Image started up, because who could possibly care that a bunch of artists moved out on their own...?
But still, that shouldn't be that discouraging. Fans (despite moves by Marvel and DC to the contrary) aren't a stagnant pool of readers. They wax and wane in their interests, and enter and exit throughout their lives. You might catch them the next time they pass through. That a baseball fan doesn't know that the Dodgers came out of Brooklyn (to pick a real-world example) isn't a huge failure, I don't think. You might be able to make a case for drivers who don't understand Newtonian motion, though...
Now, if you must feel discouraged, aim it at the people who publish books and web pages without checking their asserted "facts." If you're positioning yourself as an expert on a topic or a character (I don't really want to single out a Two-Morrows book, but the Blue Beetle book read like it was tossed off over lunch), not doing your homework shows a complete lack of ability and ethic. We need to fix them.
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