Favorite Pre-crisis Superman Artists besides Curt Swan and Wayne Boring

[nightwing]

JulianPerez writes:

Interesting. I don't deny this story is true, however...it's a stretch to interpret this as Andru being an uninspired artist with weird anatomy that is made readable by Adams and others touching him up.

I hadn't meant to imply that, exactly.  I was just saying that if "Superman vs Spider-Man" is your favorite Andru book, you may want to pick a new favorite.

From my reading of Giordano's comments, it's not totally clear why the stuff was redrawn, but the implication is that the higher-ups at both companies ordered the changes.  If that seems to insult the late Mr Andru's talents, keep in mind that DC, at least, had a long history by 1976 of redrawing Superman images to fit a company-approved look, most (in)famously with those Anderson and Plastino heads on Kirby's figures, but he wasn't alone.  I read somewhere that even Curt Swan (!) had his Lois Lane heads sometimes re-drawn by Kurt Schaffenberger, whose version was considered more "on model."

And as far as anatomy, etc, Giordano stressed that Adams was trying to make the stuff look as Adru-like as possible.  Which is weird, really.  It's almost as if they wanted to re-do the art in such a way that the readers, and even Andru himself, wouldn't know the difference.  So why bother???

I don't know that I'd call Andru "uninspired," but for my money he did have a certain look, as did Gil Kane, George Tuska and a few others, that I grew tired of.  Those guys had certain tricks, facial types and favorite poses and once I'd seen them about 1000 times, I was ready to move on.

SuperMonkey writes:

Actually Jack Kirby plotted most of his old marvel comics. Jack just wasn't very good with words, but his ideas however were some of the greatest ever, he just couldn't write dialogue to save his life.

I haven't gotten to the Kirby-penned tales in the "Challengers of the Unknown" Showcase volume yet, but it'll be interesting to see if he was better at it in the 50s than the 70s.  (Til then, I'm enjoying the heck out of Dave Wood's writing.  Who IS this guy?  Didn't he do some of the THUNDER books for Tower?  If so, the Challs beat that stuff all hollow).

[Genis Vell]

Josè Luis Garcia Lopez, Neal Adams and John Sykela.

[jamespup]

Jack Burnley

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Burnley

A fine example of his work appears in the DC Christmas TPB

[lastkryptonianhere]

Bump

[Nykor]

An artist that gets little respect for his penciling on the Legion, but was terrific inking Curt Swan, was John Forte. I believe Kurt Schaffenberger, in a biography of Swan, opined that Forte was the best Swan inker of all.

[Nykor]

I just dug my "Curt Swan: A Life in Comics" paperback out, and, on page 151, Schaffenberger is described as preferring Forte's inks on Swan to those of George Klein; not quite the same thing, but high praise indeed.
And now, for no discernible reason, I will end this post with an afro   

[Adekis]

Obviously Joe Shuster is a classic. Big fan of Gil Kane and Neal Adams, and of course Jack Kirby is an all time great. I definitely dislike that so much of his Superman work was altered by others to preserve brand uniformity! And Great Rao mentioned (over a decade ago, but still rightly) that Bogdanove was great and should get an honorable mention despite not being pre-Crisis.

I want to talk about an artist who hadn't been brought up before, and perhaps the reason I like him goes a bit against the overall theme of the site but screw it. Mike Grell's Superboy is probably my favorite visual take on the Man of Steel, bar none. The reason? Despite the name "Superboy" he's visibly a young man, full of vigor and passion. I think "young Superman" as a concept doesn't get enough traction after the early Golden Age (when he was often described as a young man), as Superman is usually drawn to look well into his 30s. I like the Golden Age idea of a passionate young man driven to fight injustice, and for my money, Grell manages to update that concept visually for the 70s, even though his Kal-El wasn't native to that decade and barely spent any time away from the future in his stories! Oh, and he didn't have to enact any stupid changes to the costume to make him look contemporary either.

[nightwing]

Oh, and he didn't have to enact any stupid changes to the costume to make him look contemporary either.

Just as well, since a "costume change" in this period of LSH history would likely have put him in speedos and a fishnet tank top. 

I loved Grell's Legion (and Green Lantern) as a lad, but I soon developed an aversion to his bizarre take on human anatomy and all those weird, stiff poses that by logic should have ended with people falling over.  By the time he got to "Warlord" I was totally over him, though I loved his writing on the eventual Green Arrow solo book.

Grell's Superboy, like the rest of his Legion, did indeed seem to have crossed that line from teen to adult, but to me, he was growing into someone different from the adult Superman appearing elsewhere.  His bone structure, his jawline, his frame were difficult to reconcile with what we knew from Superman, Action and World's Finest.  I was tempted to view the LSH character as "alternate Universe Superman" instead of "Superman when he was a boy."

All that said, if we're allowed to include SuperBOY artists here, I really liked Dave Cockrum's take on the character in LSH.  And though it seemed bland to me as a kid, I've developed a real fondness for George Papp's version, as well.