Hey, hey, hey, Groove-ophiles! Last Thursday you thrilled to
The Ever-Lovin' Blue-Eyed Thing teaming with
Starhawk as they got caught up in the mystery of
Her! Today we're digging on part two, which adds
Moondragon and even
The High Evolutionary to the mix! Toss in flashbacks featuring
Adam Warlock and a glimpse of
Thanos, and you'll understand why we heaped such praise 'pon author Mark Gruenwald and artists Jerry Bingham and Gene Day back in January 1980, when this ish of
Marvel Two-In-One (#62 to be exact) first appeared! It's a mix of Marvel continuity and Marvel cosmic, baby!
 |
| Cover art by George Perez and Joe Sinnott |
Oh, and if ya dig team-ups and cross-overs, wait'll tomorrow, baby! Ol' Groove is doing a special team-up/cross-over post with my pals Doug and Karen at
Bronze Age Babies featuring the grooviest team-up covers evah! It's gonna be faaaaaar-out!
Still love it, even with that simultaneously comical yet also cringe-inducing scene of Ben spanking Moondragon.
ReplyDeleteGene was quite a talented artist. Hard to believe he did not make it to his 32nd birthday (major coronary). Who knows what might have been...
ReplyDeleteHaha yeah Edo even after all these years the one thing I most vividly remember about reading this issue is not the cosmic storyline but rather that panel of Ben spanking Moondragon like a spoilt child! :)
ReplyDelete- Mike from Trinidad & Tobago.
Macchio and Gruenwald were terrific writers for quite a while im MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE. Another story that was hilarious was issue 60, teaming up the Thing with the Impossible Man, with a scene where the Thing is in the shower, that re-enacts the famous shower scene from the movie Psycho! With art by Perez and Gene Day, how could you go wrong?
ReplyDeleteThere were a lot of good issues in there, and Gene Day inked issues 56-58, 60, and 61-71.
Gene day also did beautiful inks over Byrne in AVENGERS 181 (the first part of a great storyline in issues 181-191).
Day also inked over Mike Zeck on MASTER OF KUNG FU 76-101, and then pencilled most issues from 102-120. 120 was the last issue he did before he died in Nov 1982. It was going to be his last issue of the series anyway, and both he and Moench were going to work on BATMAN for DC. He completed one cover for Batman, but no stories before he died.
Day also did some nice Robert E. Howard adaptations in SAVAGE SWORD OF CONAN, including a four-part story published about a year after he died. Issues 102-104, and 106 (1984). And issue 74 (March 1982).
Gene Day was an enormous talent on the verge of superstardom, and it's tragic he died when he did at only age 30. But at least he left us a large sample of his talent before he died.
I'm glad Dave Sim created an annual artist award in his honor.
If I had to pick one issue or set of issues to recommend of Gene Day, it's MASTER OF KUNG FU 102-120, or in particular issue 120. It's almost like he illustrated his own funeral, with a Scottsman on bagpipes playing a eulogy for the fallen. I also love the sophisticated Britissh aspect of the series, working for MI-6, and castles and country estates. And often surrounded by statues of ancestors and historic heroes. Especially in the static images of a comic art page, the characters in the story and the statues blend, as if history in statue form is reoccurring alongside the actions of the living. It was a series perfectly suited to Gene Day's talent.