Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Cosmic Week: "The Titan and the Hunter!" by Conway, Newton, and Rubenstein

Welcome to day two of COSMIC WEEK, Groove-ophiles! Today we're gonna take a look at how DC Comics handled "cosmic" during the Groovy Age. While DC specialized in sci-fi heroes during the Silver Age, it took Jack "King" Kirby coming back during the early 70s to introduce them to "cosmic" (or better yet, Kozmik) with his Fourth World mags. After Jack left, there were a few sparks of "cosmic" here and there  through the DCU (the best of which was probably Englehart/Rogers/Gerber/Golden on Mr. Miracle), but the best-remembered post-Kirby "cosmic" mag might be (emphasis on the might) Gerry Conway and Don Newton's Return of the New Gods. While Conway was more sci-fi than "cosmic" he was still dealing with Kirby Kozmik toys like Darkseid and the Anti-Life Equation, just in a calmer, less grandiose manner. Artist Don Newton will never be compared to Kirby (and no, that's definitely not a slap, Jack and Don are just very, very different from one another), but his New Gods have a majestic, classical feel akin to John Buscema's best Thor work, so Teen Groove really dug that. My fave ish, art-wise at least, was Return of the New Gods #16's (November 1978) "The Titan and the Hunter!" in which Joe Rubenstein did an especially suh-WEET job of inking Don's pencils. T'was the late Mr. Newton's fave ish, too, and Ol' Groove doesn't think you'll find it too hard to see why...
Cover art by Al Milgrom and Joe Rubenstein
















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2 comments:

  1. AnonymousFebruary 21, 2012 at 3:42 PM

    Thank you,Mr Groove!
    Poor General!:"-They can't involve me...I'll report them...".HaHa!
    And the art by Mr Newton & Mr Rubenstein is great!
    /Mr Anonymous

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  2. JayFebruary 26, 2012 at 1:09 PM

    An addition to your comments on this great issue - this was Don Newton's favorite inking job of his entire career. He tried, unsuccessfully, to get Joe Rubenstein to ink his work after this appeared, because he was so happy with what Joe had done on it. Most of the issue was that Rubenstein inked primarily for Marvel at the time, and Don was consistently signing with DC. Too bad we didn't see too many more Newton/Rubenstein collaborations.

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Special thanks to Mike's Amazing World of Comics and Grand Comics Database for being such fantastic resources for covers, dates, creator info, etc. Thou art treasures true!


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