Good boy.

He was a genius.

Something interesting...

Dillin pencils are a rarity. Some of the few existing examples are the three penciled pages for his final, unfinished issue of Justice League of America. Someone has commissioned Frank McLaughlin to ink those final pages (not the actual pages... the Dillin family are trying to sell those for a huge price).

A pretty cool commission. Looking forward to seeing new Dillin/McLaughlin pages for the first time in 30+ years.

Wow. I didn't know he'd done some pages for that issue. Wonder why DC didn't use them and just have Perez finish the issue, rather than have Perez redraw the whole thing from scratch?

I'm kind of glad that they didn't. I love seeing these penciled pages. They're proof of him drawing until the very end.

Frank McLaughlin's inks got thicker and thicker and by the end of Dillin's run, his pencils were very lost under them. But Dillin was a great artist who was able to balance many heroes in one story. I think that his best work was on the JLA/JSA team-up with Legion of Super-Heroes. There are some damn amazing scenes drawn in that story.





Unfortunately, Dillin didn't have much to work with when Gerry Conway took over the book and filled it with bland.

34 years later, Frank McLaughlin inks Dick Dillin's final splash page...



From Facebook:

That's amazing!

Wow, that's a big page! Looks great!

Few photos of Dillin out there. Dick's son Richard has begun to share a few:

Dick in 1944, getting a great drawing from Caniff:


Dick at his drawing board in the 50's:

i love the idea of artists back in the day drawing with a tie on. Or appearing to do so. As if it were a real job.

Me too!

That final splash page---I wonder whose idea it was to put a huge block of copy on Darksied's gut? That really should not go there. Although, Dillin may simply have had no where else TO put it, what with a zillion heroes running around....

Since the issue would have been done full script, Dillin would have known how much text he had to deal with prior to laying out the page. And he's the one that roughly hand-lettered all the text in there, so it must have been his decision to do it like that. Which brings up another question... why did he add rough lettering with his pencils on this page? That wasn't typically done. Was it because there was so much text and he wanted to let the letterer know where to put it?

I would think so. There is so much copy and characters he might have felt he had to design the whole thing.

Gives you renewed respect for the guy. That's a lot of effort. He could've just written notes telling them where to paste the logos and the lettering. And that's after four decades of non-ending work as a penciller.

I completely agree. That's a ton of work.

Just noticed that McLaughlin pasted in a different JSA logo.

The logos that were pasted up were what would have been used at the time; New Gods and JLA are paste ups too.