Fumetto Day 1.5
by Dan Nadel
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Mommy, is this heaven?
Here I am, back in beautiful Lucerne for Fumetto. The sun is shining, the sandwiches are fried and the beer is delightful. Oh yes, and there are comics, too! Many, many, many comics. Also, one Ben Jones. I’m here for my and Paul Gravett’s Jack Kirby show and Ben is here for the Ben show. There are various shows coming to life, including artists like Brecht Evans and Thomas Ott, whose life-size anatomical scratchboard (!) images are stunning and horrifying. It’s all pretty fun. The whole schlemiel opens on May 1. If you’re anywhere near Switzerland I must insist that you attend. If nothing else to take in some damn fine Kirby art. We have close to 200 pages (including all but two pages of Fantastic Four 54) and the site of all them has turned even me, cynical, grumpy, altogether jaded me, into a quivering lump of a fanboy. Gravett and I keep nudging each other like, “Can you believe this shit?” Anyhow, here are some pictures…
Oh, just an insane Devil Dinosaur spread. Only 150 more pages to go!
Detail of a Spirit World collage by Kirby. Check out the brushwork. 1971.
You haven't lived until you've seen the originals for an entire Soul Love story.
And this is all before we’ve even hung the show. Sorry to brag. It’s just too much fun. More tomorrow, including some Ben Jones candids, more gushing and more Kirby!
Labels: Ben Jones, Dan Nadel, Fumetto festival, Jack Kirby, Paul Gravett
Take pics of the “Fumetto girls”!
Maybe it’s too far away from Lucerne, but Dubuffet’s Art Brut Museum in Lausanne, is a religious experience unto itself!
Who owns the rights to Soul Love? There must be some reason that it has never been printed outside of some pages in the Kirby Collector. It would be great to see a printed in b/w.
DC owns all the unused inventory, Rob. The current thought is that it will all be published, the only question is when.
Rob, DC controls the rights to Soul Love, True Divorce Cases, In the Day’s of the Mob (a complete second issue was never published aside from bits in various fan magazines). and Spirit World (most of the second issue was published in DC’s colour mystery books in the 70’s)
Considering the mountains of junk DC has published over the years it’s hard to understand why DC is sitting on all that material, not to mention 2 issues of The Dingbats of Danger Street.
Dingbats rulez!!
I agree Patrick. I recently saw that they put out reprints of Haunted Tank of all things. They could put all of this material in one glorious book, but I’m afraid that they would put some horrible computer coloring over the whole thing.
Wasn’t some of the Spirit World stuff printed in Weird Mystery?
Bring the show to Brooklyn for the fest!
Partner,
When we have art insurance for 2.5 million dollars worth of stuff, you know I will. It’s something for us to work towards!
Oh, and man DC should hire someone to edit a great collection of True Life Divorce, Soul Love, In the Days of the Mob, etc. Full color scans of the originals. A man can dream.
Rob, All the Spirit World comics stories were collected in Weird Mystery #1-3, and Forbidden Tales of Dark Mansion #6, but there are also collage pieces that haven’t been published.
In addition Spirit World #1 was printed Blue&White which was unfortunate in my opinion, just not as unfortunate as computer colour would be. Mark Evanier has some fairly extensive comments here:
http://twomorrows.com/comicbookartist/articles/spevanier.html
FF 54 is a great choice for the show. It is the book I bought off the stands as a kid that made me realize how great Kirby is. The baseball game, the gyro vehicle, Prester John in his ancient chair, that beautiful panel of Johnny lovestruck by Crystal … just brilliant stuff.
Ah, man, my drool bucket just tipped…
The inks on those Soul Love pages are better than any I’ve seen from that series. Are they Royer-inked?
Tom, Colletta inked the Soul Love stories with one exception. One story was inked by Tony Dezuniga. The inks in the two pages above are by Dezuniga.
In my opinion Colletta did very good work on Mob #1, Spirit World #1, and Soul Love.
I’d have been very happy if Kirby had inked the books himself, or Royer, but I like the Colletta inked pages better than the story inked by Dezuniga.
The Colletta pages are marred by white-out on the faces of the lead women characters.
Apparently DC wanted Colletta to make the faces look more like Roberta Flack who was popular at the time.
Almost all the Soul Love pages can be viewed at Heritage Auction Gallery.
http://comics.ha.com/common/search_results.php?Ne=1058&Ntt=Soul+Love+&Ntk=SI_Titles&N=52+790+231+1067&Nty=1
Dan: “Oh, and man DC should hire someone to edit a great collection of True Life Divorce, Soul Love, In the Days of the Mob, etc. Full color scans of the originals. A man can dream.”
Yeah, you can dream or you can do what Adam did because he wants to work on the Smurf reprints.