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Obviously Joe Shuster is a classic. Big fan of Gil Kane and Neal Adams, and of course Jack Kirby is an all time great. I definitely dislike that so much of his Superman work was altered by others to preserve brand uniformity! And Great Rao mentioned (over a decade ago, but still rightly) that Bogdanove was great and should get an honorable mention despite not being pre-Crisis.

I want to talk about an artist who hadn't been brought up before, and perhaps the reason I like him goes a bit against the overall theme of the site but screw it. Mike Grell's Superboy is probably my favorite visual take on the Man of Steel, bar none. The reason? Despite the name "Superboy" he's visibly a young man, full of vigor and passion. I think "young Superman" as a concept doesn't get enough traction after the early Golden Age (when he was often described as a young man), as Superman is usually drawn to look well into his 30s. I like the Golden Age idea of a passionate young man driven to fight injustice, and for my money, Grell manages to update that concept visually for the 70s, even though his Kal-El wasn't native to that decade and barely spent any time away from the future in his stories! Oh, and he didn't have to enact any stupid changes to the costume to make him look contemporary either.

Whoa, my old login still works. Incredible.

I am so sorry to hear about Dick Siegel. He was a great one. When I was a young kid, I wanted to move to Ft. Meyers to work for the Weekly World News and he even wrote a letter of recommendation for me. It never worked out, alas, but he had my back.

He even gave me an introduction to a personal hero of mine, David Anthony Kraft. For years, I thought DAK was just a pen name for Steve Englehart, since Kraft followed Stainless Steve and even used his characters on various Defenders runs, so it was a surprise to find out he was a real person. I mentioned this to Dick in passing and he said, "oho, didn't you know he was a friend of mine from art school?" And he made an introduction. Cool guy, great artist too.

Once, I asked Dick why he shortened his name to Dick and he said that it was due to the fact he wanted to sign his name with a D like Walt Disney.

He was an endless resource for pulp know-how. He knew everything there was to know on everyone from Nictzin Dyalhis to Leigh Brackett. I think his love of Superman is an extension of his love of pulp scifi and the Astounding era.

If you can, read his book, "Alien Creatures," which had Superman.

I wasn't counting the Showcase volumes, which is a dead line (Batman v. 6 was the last of them).  That line saw plenty of BA material, including the Legion of Super-Heroes, Phantom Stranger, Brave and the Bold and arguably Enemy Ace. Yes, I would definitely count volumes 5 and 6 of Showcase Presents: Batman as "Bronze Age," and it's no surprise those are the only two I own.  But even then, they followed the same pattern of starting with the Silver Age and working their way up to Bronze.  Superman never made it that far as his Showcase line died with Vol. 4 (a crying shame, BTW: I bought and loved all of them).

The good news is the omni line will soon be ready to move to the Bronze Age of the Flash (another fave) and we've already got the JLA going.  The bad news is I'll likely be in a retirement home before the Batman and Superman omnis get that far.

[http://sarcastic.nu/lois-clark-the-best-show-ever/]

New page:



http://sarcastic.nu/lois-clark-the-best-show-ever/

 

Klar's posts here at the STTA forum http://forum.superman.nu/index.php?action=profile;u=111;sa=showPosts

A brief obit by BK Munn https://frequential.blogspot.com/2018/06/dick-siegel1955-2018.html

Youtube Channel https://www.youtube.com/user/MarsFilm

 

Members of this forum might like to know that Dick Siegel has died. Siegel was a member here for many years, posting as Klar Ken T5477.

Dick often shared hints of his comic book writing projects here, and often discussed his work as an editor and writer for Weekly World News and National Enquirer. He had an extensive comics and film bio, besides his work as a journalist, humour writer, and pop culture historian.

Here is his IMDB page: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0797000/bio

Here is a profile of Siegel from GQ, from around the time the Enquirer was seriously being considered for a Pulitzer because of their coverage of the John Edwards political scandal:

Edwards was the first major story the Enquirer broke online. "We're the last of the Mohicans in terms of discovering our Web site," Levine says. They caught Edwards at the Beverly Hilton after that week's paper locked; worried that Edwards would attempt to spin the story before next week's edition, they posted the story on the Web site on Tuesday morning.

The Enquirer's full-time Web staff consists of one guy. Dick Siegel is in his fifties, works out of a cubicle decorated with color rod comic-book covers from the '60s; the fact that he's an obvious pop-culture junkie ("I was able to write Fess Parker's obit, or 90 percent of it, off the top of my head, which is scary") makes him the ideal man to run the Enquirer's Web site, where Old Hollywood types—Natalie Wood, Ingrid Bergman—tend to get more hits than Justin Bieber and the Jersey Shore kids. (By way of illustration, he pulls up a recent blog post, sourced to Carrie Fisher's Twitter, about speed fiend eddie fisher.)

"My forte is not journalism," Siegel says. "I'd be fired. I had been working at the late, lamented Weekly World News. That was after my film jobs—I'd been an independent-film cinematographer. Really bad horror movies. Including one that I wrote, about zombies at a women's prison."
He tells me that the Weekly World News gig was good training for what he does now. You learned to write short stories, in AP style, even if they concerned the travails of Bat Boy, "and present them in a serious manner, even if the punch line was a joke."
But it makes sense that someone with Siegel's background wound up at the Enquirer. The tabs are a form of rogue pop culture. They're vehicles for celebrity adoration, but they burrow, termitelike, into the sanctioned narratives of American fame. They're camp—a form of fantasy that revels and resists. They're a comic-book, zombie-movie draft of Hollywood history, right down to the zingy sobriquets.
"It's like professional wrestling," Siegel says. "When we wrote about Tiger Woods's wife, we always described her as 'livid,' so now she's always 'livid Elin.' And Rielle Hunter is 'the New-Age Temptress.'"
Heroes and villains, in primary colors. "That's what separates the giant scandals from the everyday scandals," Levine says, explaining to me why Tiger Woods and Edwards, stepping out on his cancer-stricken wife, were tabloid rocket fuel. "If somebody is a hero and they do something unthinkable, something unconscionable, if the betrayal is so overwhelmingly dirty and sickening, that's what makes what we do."

DC did reprint some of the Bronze Age Batman stories in the last (the very last) Showcase Presents, Batman, no. 6, which came out 2 1/2 years ago, though I suppose it's arguable that these aren't Bronze Age but "In-between Eras Age", since the stories first appeared while DC's sales were in the doldrums of the early '70s, before things took off again in '75.

I just dug my "Curt Swan: A Life in Comics" paperback out, and, on page 151, Schaffenberger is described as preferring Forte's inks on Swan to those of George Klein; not quite the same thing, but high praise indeed.
And now, for no discernible reason, I will end this post with an afro   

My favorite story was far and away The Car. It's about what happened to the big, green, car in Action #1 and what became of "Butch", the thug from the first story. It's definitely a Golden Age story. Written by Richard Donner, none the less! The best stories were the ones that didn't get all the media attention, IMO. Actionland was clearly a love letter to the Silver Age. Even the Brad Meltzer story was really good. If you can find it, I highly recommend it.