Friday, June 06, 2008

Quasar Part 6

Three moree pages from Quasar Issue 10 today.These pages were a lot more fun because I got to do some big super jock action! In a way looking back on these pages this story sort of reminds me of a Superman story because Q-man alway had that cape. And a cap always adds a dynamic element to a figure, a design element to lead the eye in a composition, but it also complicates it. Capes need to be dynamic and not some ugly, flacid shape that confuses the eye. Kirby is once again the King of this with his invention of that dynamic, starched cape he gave everyone. No cape drapes from the body in the way he drew them, but what he did was create this little archetype that we artists all borrowed to some degree when we do superheroes.

6 comments:

Urban Barbarian said...

You know I have some funny stories about inking some of the issues after this one!

I was so new to the game that on rare occasions Mike would ink a small face or two in the pages. It was beautiful. Unfortunately I mentioned it one time to my editor [ I was actually learning from Mike's inks! ] but Mike was told not to put anymore ink on the pencils...! LOL! I assume he thought it was slowing him down or something. Luckily, I learned some better inking from the experience while it lasted. I had only been using a brush and found a whole new realm of pen-tips and rapidiographs thanks to Mister Manley!

Mike Manley said...

Ah, how I remember the young fresh face!

God, how different those times were!
Now I need to pick up the body building techniques from you!

Tegan O'Neil said...

Thank you for printing these old pages. Quasar was and remains one of my favorite all-time series, even all these years later after most of the nostalgia for that period has worn off. Mark Gruenwald really put a lot of himself into the series, and while it was certainly square as hell, it was also one of the better superhero comics from that era. I remember liking your work on Quasar but thinking you were much better suited to Darkhawk, even if it seemed as if that series never quite found its groove in the same way that Quasar did for a time with Gruenwald.

Mike Manley said...

Tim, it was a weird time to be sure, working in the biz as it seemd that a square book like Quasar was readily dissed...and my work too, as not being sexy enough..and Darkhawk I think even more. Lots of haters then. But then you know now I get lots of kudos from people who really dug that stuff, younger fans then, older now. For me the weakness of DH was it had too much Peter Parker to it. I wanted to do more sc-fi stuff.

Tegan O'Neil said...

That's interesting - looking back on the book, the thing that really jumps out abotu Darkhawk to me was the fact that the character was kind of like Peter Parker if Peter Parker had grown up on the wrong side of the tracks, had ambiguous moral role models, and had to constantly think through the same moral decisions that came naturally to other heroes. Some of that came through, especially in the issues that dealt with his father and his family, but eventually he just became annoyingly selfish instead of, what I believe was initially intended, something a bit more complex than merely another wannabe bad-ass. But then, it is better, I guess, for a book to have had unfulfilled ambitions than no ambition at all, which is how I would qualify most of today's superhero books.

Mike Manley said...

Tim, I'm sure the fact Danny was editing Spidey at the time he was doing DH was a big influence. It's typical for books to go off course after a fashion, it happens att the time as working in comics is a very organic process. In comics everything is one degree seperation from Superman, so I think that plays in to with the conventions of the double idenity, etc. It's all in how you spin the ball.

20+ years on, DH still seems to have clicked with people and compared to a lot of what I see today, we packed a lot more entertainment into a single issue that most comics do now, and they were cheaper too.