Throughout the remainder of the Groovy Age, DC would commission some cool contents page art for their sixty-cent and Dollar Comic mags. We'll look at some of those masterpieces in a future post. Sound good to ya, Groove-ophiles?
Saturday, March 20, 2010
Making a Splash: Cool Contents
No, they're not really splash pages, but during DC's experiment with making several of their titles 100 page mags, they would often give the first page over to a table of contents. Most of the time the art on the contents page was some cut and paste job featuring older, reworked art from random sources. Sometimes, though, a wise editor would commission a brand new piece of art from a fave artist like Walt Simonson, Sal Amendola, or Howard Chaykin (not 100% sure on that one, though...). Once in a while a hot up-and-coming artist like Pat Broderick (often inked by yet another newcomer, Terry Austin) got a shot at creating contents page art. Here are some of Ol' Groove's faves from Brave and the Bold, Detective Comics, and World's Finest!
Throughout the remainder of the Groovy Age, DC would commission some cool contents page art for their sixty-cent and Dollar Comic mags. We'll look at some of those masterpieces in a future post. Sound good to ya, Groove-ophiles?
Throughout the remainder of the Groovy Age, DC would commission some cool contents page art for their sixty-cent and Dollar Comic mags. We'll look at some of those masterpieces in a future post. Sound good to ya, Groove-ophiles?
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These WERE cool. I remember them well...and sometimes they were the best drawn (certainly best laid out) pages in the books.
ReplyDeleteIn order (some credited, some not) BRAVE & THE BOLD 114 title page is by Pat Broderick.
ReplyDeleteDETECTIVE COMICS 440 title page by Howard Chaykin (and the first story as well).
DETECTIVE COMICS 439 contents page by Sal Almendola (credited on one of the gravestones, a very cool page).
Title page for DETECTIVE 443 with Manhunter by Simonson.
DETECTIVE COMICS 442, with Batman standing by a circus banner containing the issues story contents, by Pat Broderick.
WORLD'S FINEST 225 contents page by Broderick, Oct 1974 in the indica at the bottom.
WORLD'S FINEST 226, also by Broderick.
As I understand it, doing the contents pages and other special new 2 or 3 page features in the 100-page issues were Pat Broderick's first pro work in comics.
After that, his first actual stories were for the Seaboard-Atlas comics in 1975, such as PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES 1 and 2, BLAZING BATTLE TALES 1 (pencils, inked by Sparling, 12p), and a backup in PHOENIX 3 (a street-fighting Batman-like character, The Dark Avenger, inked by Austin, 8p).
From there I think Broderick's first series work was on CAPTAIN MARVEL in the last few issues before that title was cancelled (issues 55-62, and continued after cancellation in 1979 in MARVEL SPOTLIGHT 1-3)
And then where I first heard of him on MICRONAUTS 19-34 in 1980-1981.
Plus a "Creature Commandos" story or two by Broderick for WEIRD WAR TALES around the same time.
But Broderick had already done fantastic work on his CAPTAIN MARVEL run, back before he rose to stardom.