I tried to post this in the old thread but it's too long since it was bumped.

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=11912

Anyway, I have been using my MArvel Unlimited to read comics I missed in my Hidden Years period and one of them is Spectacular Spider-Man. I stopped reading comics when this was in the early 40s ( and some awful Mike Zeck art) but have been working my way steadily through what is available (unfortunately not everything). The stories take an unfortunate turn for the 'gritty,' as Peter David starts writing the title, but there is some truly brilliant Sal Buscema art here - I really, really like his style here, clearly aping Miller's Dark Knight but with his own dynamic layouts and story telling chops.

It's some of the best work by him I have seen, and I'm really appreciating and enjoying it for what it is - great old fashioned story telling and some interesting stylistic choices with the different line weights and use of a sketchy shading technique. I know this is all old hat to most of you but I'm lovin it!

He's like Todd McFarlane with a sense of anatomy and perspective

His storytelling is impeccable but I didn't care for his more angular drawing style -- I liked the slicker stuff from earlier in his career.

McFarlane's perspective drawing is actually fine, he used to draw nice city-scapes when he did Spider-Man.

One of the first comics I ever bought was a Marvel Tales that reprinted Marvel Team-Up #56... it was a job worthy of John Romita Sr himself. If his art always looked like this, he'd be a favorite.

(Couldn't find scans of the interiors but for some reason, this YouTube video of the issue exists.)

Rather than McFarlane, this style of art actually looks more similar to the posing and storytelling style of Erik Larsen to me.

Ah well I don't have enough experience of him, but would you say Sal was first and Larsen after?

Ha! I know it well - used to own it - and I wasn't keen on it I didn't like Dave Hunt (I think it was) on him and always preferred him when he was inked by either Klaus Janson or (more rarely) by Tom Palmer.
That comic is from a period where his art looked very similar from issue to issue to me - as I understand it he was being used to meet deadlines, because he could work quickly (I think it was Erik Larsen who told me that, on this very board!) and so his work looked pretty stock, or even rushed, in that period. What I like about the Spectacular issues is that they seem to have much more attention to detail to them than most of his work in that period. YMMV

Chronologically or how I rate them as an artist? The first one is so obvious that I assume you mean the second but I'm not 100% sure.

I've just looked at it again, and it is much better than I remembered; but it doesn't have the oomph of these "Spectacular" issues, to my eye.

Move everything to Imgur, please, or they'll disappear and we'll end up with yet another empty art appreciation thread.

No sorry, I meant literally - did these issues come before Larsen's work or after? Remember I wasn't a comic fan at the time! What little I have seen of Larsen looks like he is aping this style.

I'd say the older Sal stuff has the look of a generic house-style Marvel artist -- well-done from a craft perspective, done in the Marvel style fans expect, but devoid of that special something that puts other Marvel "house" artists like Kirby, Romita Sr, Buscema, etc. For me, it's on par with most of what I've seen of Rich Buckler's output.

The newer "Spectacular" stuff looks more stylistically ambitious and unique to a specific artist -- for example, I didn't even know Sal drew that issue of MTU until I looked it up a couple years back and was genuinely surprised to find it was him, while the Spectacular material can't be mistaken for any other artist -- but I just find it ugly, especially in the faces, which is hard to overcome. The only artists who can overcome ugly faces for me (off the top of my head) have been Kirby, John Romita Jr, Ditko, and to a far lesser extent, Erik Larsen (whose art I am not a fan of these days from a style perspective) -- and I'd still prefer someone fix the faces in all their art, even Jack's.

But the storytelling is powerful, absolutely. I remember him doing a silent sequence during the death of Harry Osborn in SSM #200 that was very poignant. In fact, that entire issue is really well-done from a storytelling perspective.

Is that better?

I need to clarify a bit from upthread - when I say "awful Mike Zeck" art, I don't mean that I think Mike Zeck's art is awful - on the contrary, he has produced some amazing work - but I assume these issues are some of his earliest comics work, and they are pretty bad!

I think it was somewhat concurrent but Sal probably started making this shift before Larsen was even doing comics professionally -- you can see hints of it in all his work, even the slicker 60s stuff -- that said, Larsen's style was already going in this direction before Sal made the change. I think it comes down to having a lot of the same influences, such as Jack Kirby and Gil Kane, and both having a similar approach of approaching figures in a blocky, angular way -- probably because both prefer producing a greater volume of work quickly rather than refining each page.

I'm not familiar enough with Sal's work to make a definitive judgement, but I think Larsen is the superior comicbook artist due to his thoughtfulness and experimentation in storytelling. He's really a student of the medium. Through the years on Savage Dragon, he's played with all kinds of inking styles and storytelling experiments -- one of his most recent experiments was to do an entire issue with a different grid layout on each page. Even if you hate his art, you'd probably enjoy his musing on storytelling techniques in his COMICS 101 gallery on Facebook --

https://www.facebook.com/erik.larsen.75/photos_albums

And on the subject of Sal Buscema, Larsen has depicted flashbacks to different time periods in Savage Dragon by emulating the style of the comics at the time. A flashback to the 70s was done in the style of -- you guessed it, Sal Buscema!




And while OT, I might as well post the two other examples he shared to FB, done in the Golden Age Kirby style and the 60s Gene Colan style (stuff like this is what's made me such a big fan of his over the years) --

I totally agree -- he's done work that's totally blown me away and done other work that I've found completely lackluster. It's amazing to me that the guy who drew the cover below could also have drawn something as lackluster as Secret Wars -- but it seems deadlines can dramatically affect the quality of his work. It's a shame Shooter didn't get Byrne to do Secret Wars.

Thanks, Ian.

Shooter put a lot of pressure on Zeck and Beatty during Secret Wars with re-dos and corrections. In fact I think Shooter insisted that Zeck use his Shooter's layouts. So, the book was late and Bob Layton had to fill-in..