Review: 'The Alex Ross Marvel Comics Super Villains Poster Book'

 

In 2019, Marvel artist Alex Ross created a mural of heroes for the comic giant's NY offices. A few years later he followed it up with the natural dark counterpart, and now Abrams ComicArts has compiled these portraits in The Alex Ross Marvel Comics Super Villains Poster Book. 

Because Ross created each painting individually before situating it in the larger work, he is able to give each baddie his or her own page to be pulled out and pasted on your wall. With nothing but a plain white field for background, each colorful creep is free to pop from the book's 11" x 16" pages. 

Marvel Comics Artist's and Artisan Editions

Before the colorists have their ways with comic book pages, line artists conceive and perfect the contours of the superheroes who swing across skylines on their webs or smash through brick walls. For some aficionados, pre-colored pages are the purest products of the central artist's vision, hence the existence of "Artisan" and "Artist's" editions of iconic comics. 

IDW's latest additions to its "Artisan" and "Artist's" library showcase Jack Kirby's unpretentious illustrations for Fantastic Four issues #71, #82-84, and Annual #6 (in which the Invisible Girl brings down an android and the FF put Maximus's hypno-gun out of commission), John Romita's similarly bold and basic work for Spiderman #67-69, #71, #75, and #84 (in which Spidey finds himself shrunk down to 6 inches and grapples with the Kingpin), and a random assortment of pages depicting Jim Lee's comparatively complex work on X-Men. 

Unlike the "Artisan" homages to Kirby and Romita, Lee's Artist's Edition makes no attempt to spin stories. It's all about the art, which appears on astoundingly huge 12" x 17 1/2" pages in a hardcover package with giant centerfold. When the illustrations are blown up to such proportions and drained of color, the eye is drawn to unexpected spots on the page. The central images that register with perfect punch on standard-sized pages step aside to allow the small details to swoop out: the tirelessly applied hatching, the wrinkles of a furrowed brow (there are a lot of those), the stubble on a square jaw (lots of those too). 

The pages of Jack Kirby's Fantastic Four: Artisan Edition, John Romita's The Amazing Spider Man: Artisan Edition, and Jim Lee's X-Men: Artist's Edition are also uncommonly tactile despite the absence of consciously applied color. Taped-on typed page numbers, globs of white paint, penned notes in margins, and even dirty fingerprints humanize comics that always seemed a bit like they slipped in from some more perfect dimension.

Review: 'Conversations with Mark Frost: Twin Peaks, Hill Street Blues, and the Education of a Writer'

David Lynch is responsible for the immediately recognizable visual language of Twin Peaks, but as far as its story goes, Mark Frost had the most control over its direction on an episode-to-episode basis. Yet Frost is serially left out of the conversation because he does not have Lynch’s flair for self-promotion and because he did not have as audacious a resume as Lynch did before the show began.

David Bushman’s new book Conversations with Mark Frost: Twin Peaks, Hill Street Blues, and the Education of a Writer sets the record straight in a few ways. Between February 2018 and October 2019, Bushman conducted a series of 22, one-hour phone interviews with Mark Frost after clearly doing a lot of homework. Bushman asks the right questions to fill in each significant phase of Frost’s family, personal, and creative history. And that history is startling and peppered with odd anecdotes. His grandfather was one of the first doctors to work with Margaret Sanger on Planned Parenthood. His dad Warren (Twin Peaks’ Doc Hayward) once had dinner with FDR. Mark investigated UFOs with a guy from MUFON in the late seventies. He worked alongside Michael Keaton in the lighting department of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and dubbed either Bennie or Bjorn’s voice (he can’t remember which) in a documentary about ABBA.

Review: 'Kirby & Lee: Stuf’ Said!'

In 2014, the Jack Kirby estate reached a settlement with Marvel that saw the late comics artist/writer finally receive credit for his multitudinous contributions to co-creating the Marvel Universe with Stan Lee. Comics historian John Morrow was an expert witness for the Kirby family in the case. Five years later, Morrow has published his own investigation into the matter of whether Kirby or Lee can be called the true father of Marvel in the form of an oral history called Kirby & Lee: Stuf’ Said!

The book is a chronological he said/he said narrative that essentially picks up steam in the early sixties and continues through the settlement. Oral histories tend to be unreliable, and Stuf’ Said! certainly comes with its own baggage. Stan Lee was a shamelessly self-aggrandizing self-promoter who believed that writers are the true creators. Jack Kirby was bitter and sometimes lashed out in both interviews and satirical comics that depicted Lee as a talent leech. Despite input from many of the people closest to these two men, a definitive answer to Morrow’s central question remains elusive.

However, examining that question—which should really only be of concern to the Kirby and Lee estates despite some fans treating it like some sort of pro-wrestling rivalry— isn’t really the main draw of Stuf’ Said! The book is much more interesting as a close examination of the ups and downs of a working relationship between two very influential creative people with their own personal foibles told largely in their own words without too much editorializing by the author. Although Morrow’s role in the settlement may raise eyebrows, he does an admirable job of remaining neutral throughout the book, occasionally making an attempt to interpret the intent behind a statement while framing that interpretation as something that needs to be taken with a grain of salt (which he conveniently and cleverly signals with a little graphic of a salt shaker).

Morrow’s efforts to cover the men’s public opinions of each other is certainly thorough, though there is the unavoidable issue of imbalance since Lee was so addicted to performing interviews and writing editorials and Kirby was not. There is also a lot of repetition to wade through as the men tended to say the same things in a lot of these interviews: Lee incessantly explains how it was his idea to create superheroes with foibles, Kirby regularly insists he was behind the X-Men and the Fantastic Four because he was concerned about radiation, Lee loves to say that Frankenstein and Jekyll and Hyde inspired him to create the Hulk, and so on. Occasionally there are minor variations in these statements that Morrow seizes on to point out an inconsistency in the speaker’s memories, but all that repetition doesn’t always make for the most compelling reading.

Still, fans who feel they have a pony in this race will find Kirby & Lee: Stuf’ Said! fascinating, and like all books by Morrow’s TwoMorrow’s Publishing, it is great to look at with oodles of color and B&W artwork and a witty format.