"HE'S LIKE THE YODA OF COMICS" - my friend Liz
Bringing you the very best in comics art and cosplay - 10,000 posts and still going strong! KoC has been linked to/reblogged by the likes of Neil Gaiman, Brian Michael Bendis, Dave Gibbons, Gail Simone, Kelly Sue DeConnick, Kieron Gillen, Mike Deodato Jr, Marcio Takara, Adam Hughes, Paolo Rivera, and Ty Templeton. KoC has also been mentioned on Comics Alliance & The Mary Sue. (I'm not one to brag, though.)
My personal blog is here, FWIW.
Promotional piece for Zero Hour, produced by Jurgens & Ordway for the Advance Comics distributor catalog circa mid-1994.
This is the charity piece Gail Simone mentions in her lovely tribute to Joe Kubert. Go read it if you haven’t already.
Very sad to hear that the legendary Joe Kubert has passed on. This was the image that immediately sprang to mind when I decided I wanted to post something he drew here on Tumblr. Possibly not one that most Kubert fans would have chosen, nor one that even I would hold up as being most representative of his work. But I came to realize once I went looking for it online that it’s the perfect way to pay tribute to him.
The splash page above is from Justice League of America (vol. 1) #200. Like most Justice League stories of that era, it features the team splitting up for solo or small-group adventures before coming back together at the end to wrap things up. Since this was an anniversary issue, they recruited a pantheon of legendary artists to illustrate the solo adventures. In addition to Kubert, they got Gil Kane to do the chapter featuring Green Lantern and The Atom; Jim Aparo, the chapter with Aquaman and Red Tornado; Dick Giordano, Wonder Woman and Zatanna; Carmine Infantino, The Flash and Elongated Man; Brian Bolland, Batman, Green Arrow, and Black Canary; and, wrapping it all up, George Perez. (And also Pat Broderick, doing the Martian Manhunter/Firestorm chapter. Nothing against Broderick, but he’s not in the same league as those other guys.)
And those other guys aren’t in Kubert’s. Don’t get me wrong, they’re all titans of the industry, and justly held up as among the greatest artists ever to work in the field. Which is why, when I did a search on Justice League #200, I recognized all the images and was able to identify all the artists at a glance. But the image above by Kubert… that one I remembered. When I saw it on my laptop screen, it looked exactly as I pictured it in my head. So what better image to remember him by, which by itself is more memorable than the combined efforts of six other all-time greats and Pat Broderick?
(Incidentally, in case you’re wondering what the heck is going on here, Hawkman is trying to stop Superman from recovering a kryptonite meteor. Knowing that kryptonite is deadly to Superman and that he was therefore likely to send in some of his Superman robots to get it, and assuming by way of comic book logic that those robots might be more vulnerable to ancient weaponry than to lasers and what have you, Hawkman has armed himself with a mace and other medieval armaments. And in fact, he successfully destroyed two Superman robots just so. But the third Superman robot to arrive turns out to be the real Superman wearing transparent lead armor, resulting in the scene depicted above, after which Superman literally punches Hawkman into orbit.)
If you’d like to see some other great Joe Kubert splash pages, the Daily Splash Page blog has featured several, including an amazing double splash of Tarzan fighting a lion.
I awoke to the sad news that one of the comics greats, Joe Kubert, had passed away. Dave Gibbons confirmed the news via Twitter. CBR offers up a precis of his life and work:
Kubert’s body of work in comics as an artist and writer is as storied and diverse as they come. His highlights include milestone Golden Age pages for DC Comics “Hawkman,” an acclaimed body of war and military comics including the adventures of Sgt. Rock, early comics journalism including “Fax from Sarajevo,” personal graphic novels like “Yossel” and in recent years, a number of commercial comics projects as well as regular art or the U.S. Army’s “PS Magazine.”
Across the comics community, Kubert was known also as a pioneer in teaching the comics medium. In 1976, he founded The Joe Kubert School of Cartoon & Graphic Art, recently renamed simply The Kubert School. From there, generations of cartoonists have made their way into the comics artform and industry thanks to Kubert’s dedicated focus on story and craft.
Of course, his most famous students may be his sons Adam and Andy – two of the first Kubert school graduates and mainstream comic art superstars. The pair have taught with their father at the Kubert School’s Dover, NJ campus for years. And the elder Kubert has collaborated with both sons in recent years including a current run on “Before Watchmen: Nite Owl” with Andy.
Vale, sir, and thank you.
(Picture of Kubert via Boston Comic Con; Hawkman commission via Drive-In Mike.)
Hawkman (by LynxPics)
If you told me in 2012 that not only would there be a Watchmen followup, Rob Liefeld would be sheparding three DC titles (one of which was a former Wildstorm mainstay)…I honestly wouldn’t know what to say, and yet here we are.
DC Comics super-stars, circa 1962
With Sugar & Spike and the Fox & the Crow upfront. *sigh* A more innocent time…
(via sugaronastick)
This is what Batman looks like when he laughs. Sweet dreams.
From Diversions of the Groovy Kind’s coverage of the first Marshall Rogers Batman story. Read the whole story there for this panel’s context. Not that it’ll help any.
This is the story that introduced the Calculator, BTW (before he was reworked into the ‘information broker’ we saw from Identity Crisis onwards).
