Superman Through the Ages! Forum

Enjoy!

http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/2007/05/31/comic-book-urban-legends-revealed-105/ (http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/2007/05/31/comic-book-urban-legends-revealed-105/)

While I have no love for Plastino, the most traditional and dull of the Superman artists...I can understand DC's thinking on the redrawing of the Superman faces.

I mean, holy cow, did you SEE Kirby's Superman face?

He looked like the a 48 year old love child of George Clooney and a balding Neanderthal.

And of COURSE Jolly Jack would get bitchy about the faces being redrawn. It points out one of his weaknesses when he both pencils and inks his work (as opposed to being paired with someone like Joe Sinnott), which is his weird, ultra-stylized craggy faces.

Call me crazy but I liked that Superman's face didn't match up with the rest of the art in the book. Kirby's Jimmy Olsen was so weird already (those black and white photos??? crazy hippie bikers!?!???? GOODY RICKLES!!!?????)

this just added to the overall craziness. (which I enjoyed)

With due respect to the King, whose work could be brilliant, there is no freaking way I would have picked up a Jimmy Olsen comic as a kid without the "cosmetic surgery" provided by Anderson and Plastino.  Kirby's faces, like everything else he drew, got more and more stylized over time and by the 70s they were barely recognizable as human.  This is the main reason I avoided his "Captain America" and other 70s work like the proverbial plague.

Similarly, while I'm a big Toth fan, his original art on that SuperFriends cover makes Supes look like a complete doofus.  The small cranium, huge jaw and open mouth just say "Duhhhh......" to me.  I'm betting in this case it's not so much that he's "off model" as that the picture is just not at all flattering to Big Blue.

Anyone else notice Kirby's tic of drawing eyebrows sort of arched and squiggly? Maybe it's just me, but I tend to notice people's eyebrows, and it's amazing what diversity they can achieve: some are straight, some are triangular, some are bushy, some are just a continuous slash across the forehead, and that's just off the top of my head. Not so in Kirby - all his eyebrows look like little serif-adorned black bolts of lightning above someone's eyes. I'm not trying to belittle his talent, which was more than considerable, but faces weren't really his forte.

Al Plastino is underated. He never set the world on fire, but he never offended. Kind of hard to feel one way or another for good old Al, to be honest.

Plastino was fine, often he could imitate the huge barrel torsos of Wayne Boring that were very distinctive, almost as distinctive as Kirby drawing Supes looking almost exactly like the Guardian...

Plastino was one of my absolutely favorite Silver age Superman artists.  It was actually his renditions of Swan's Superman that got me interested in learning who drew Superman.  Unfortunately his art left a lot to be desired in the Wedding Album, but God knows why that happened.  It was terrible to see such his art applied to Super-fabio.  On more than one occassion however, I thought he aped Swan better than Swan.

THAT explains why I looked at that Superfriends TPB and found it oddly different from my childhood memories of the treasury comic.