Friday, March 12, 2010

Hey Look! Steranko Covers!

It was such a treat, back in the late 60s, to come up to a comic spinner in the drug store and find comics with Steranko covers. Of course it WAS still the Silver Age, so there would also be covers by Neal Adams, Joe Kubert, Gil Kane, Curt Swan, Jack Kirby, Infantino, on and on (SWEET Sixties). But covers by Jim Steranko were more rare than the others and they always compelled me to buy the comic without even looking inside. And sometimes it was a double treat to find Steranko art inside, such as the X-Men comic shown below.

Steranko was a huge fan of the golden age, and he brought much of those qualities, with improvements, to us monkeyboys of the 60s.






7 comments:

Joe Ackerman said...

I've always loved that first Creatures cover. I've got a terrific old UK Marvel Captain America Annual which collects the three issues he did in a slim hardcover, that I was just in awe of the other night. what a book. he was something else, wasn't he?

Eric said...

Steranko's work is always stunning; I just wish there was more of it. It's hard to remember that his total comic book output, other than covers, was roughly 40 issues. 18 Strange Tales, 4 Nick Fury, 2 X-Men, 3 Captain America, 1 Tower of Shadows, 1 romance story, 1 Superman Story, The Block, Chandler, and Outland. (I can't remember exactly how many issues Outland took in Heavy Metal off the top of my head.) Oh, and scripts and one panel for Spyman. But what issues those are!

Right now I'm trying to find the Shadow paperbacks he did covers for. Beautiful stuff; I've got about 10 of them so far.

Daniel [oeconomist.com] said...

Although he went on to do better work, I was especially struck by the three issues of Captain America that he did.

Booksteve said...

His Cap issues still read like no other comics of their day!

And wow, you're right. That's not much comics. Of course, he did the 2 HISTORY volumes which hooked so many of us on comics past, also as well as tons of comics-related illustrations in Comixscene/Mediascene/Mediascene PREVUE/ PREVUE!

Thomas Haller Buchanan said...

Yeah, I got those Cap issues when they first hit the stands, loved em and then traded em off only a few years later, of course regretting that now. And yeah I actually still refer to the history volumes and treasure those. And I actually forgot about the HUGE illustrations he did for Comixscene, which I have here somewhere, but filed away so perfectly that I have no idea where they are.

Tony said...

Eric,
In the graphic story field he also did Repent Harlequin in the Illusterated Harlan Ellison and Steranko:Graphic Prince of Darkness (which he called a docu-comic). There are two unpublished comics stories, Dantes Inferno and Secret Agent X. Red Tide was well over 100 pages, so shouldn't that count for more than one 20 page comic story and Outland was 44 pages.

Tony said...

And I forgot Frogs from Comixcene #3, it took up one page but was equal to about an 8 page story.