Wednesday, January 23, 2013

No Better Cause

This is one of the drawings that I bought from Gil Kane himself, at the time he was creating a lot of Superman material for DC. It's an iconic pose, with iconic power auras like Kane was prone to draw at the time. This and some other stuff I've been hoarding for years is coming up for auction at Heritage Auctions. I'm loathe to let them go, but I have no better cause than to help our daughter to continue her college education.

Gil Kane — Superman — 1980s


4 comments:

Jessica Grant said...

I hope it all does well at auction and your daughter does well at college.
hope you've got it all advertised across the sort of sites that will be frequented by those interested in such.

Thomas Haller Buchanan said...

Thanks Jessica. I'm not very good at making that kind of broadcast advertising. I'd hire my daughter to do that job for me, but we're all too tied up trying to get new projects to pay for everything else. BTW, my daughter has been doing great at college, but won't be attending again til fall, pending our fund raising.

Thanks for the encouragement!

Annie said...

Good luck with the sale. Hopefully, it will give you the cushion you need, and you can feel good about sharing some of your amazing "finds" and "purchases."

Kid said...

I hope you're making good scans of pages like these before you part with them, Thom. I remember when Gil Kane took over Superman in Action Comics around '82/'83, and 'though his layouts were a little more dynamic than Curt Swan's, I thought his style was a little overwhelming. If I remember correctly, he was inking himself - whereas I think it would have been wiser to have had someone like Murphy Anderson ink him.

I always felt that, good as he was, it looked like he had rubber stamps of character positions and faces, which he would stamp on the artboard, then fill in whatever the costume was and tweak the features (like draw in a moustache, or whatever). Remember all those 'up the nose' shots? His art just looked too 'samey' for me, what with all his stock action poses. Given the right inker 'though (like on Green Lantern), his stuff could be very appealing.