Sam Kieth, R.I.P.

Sorry to hear about the passing of Sam Kieth last week at the far too young age 63, reportedly after some very long and difficult health problems.  He had a long running blog that he posted to fairly steadily from 2010 to 2023, with thousands of image filled posts packed with some stuff you've probably never seen.

Here's a small selection of some pages and a few covers which caught my eye while pulling out some samples of work from his long career.

Some notes on them...

The Maxx was his signature character, really distinctively designed, playing into all the excesses his work was known for and stretching them even further, to the breaking point. This is from his (kind of) first appearance in DARKER IMAGE #1, scripted by William Messner-Loebs.



More of the Maxx, a few issues in to his on-going series, when things started to get really strange and there was even more going on than you might have expected.



Kieth is also known as the co-creator of The Sandman (with Mike Dringenberg and Neil Gaiman, who also worked on the page above).  He only worked on the first five issues, but brought a lot to the book and key to its success.  In this page he also gets to draw a nice version of Jack Kirby's character Etrigan.


A 1991 page from a Wolverine story, written by Peter David.  I just have a few chapters of this, it's really wild.  Would love a nice book of those.



A Hulk page written by Peter David, a really intense standalone issue of the series which presents a  different version of the character, really like nothing else being published by Marvel at the time.



A nice double page pin-up of Hadji Quest and his brother Jonny, from when Kieth's frequent collaborator William Messner-Loebs was writing the book featuring the boys. Lot of nice little details in this when you start looking around.

Speaking of Messner-Loebs, he lettered this backup by John Holland and Kieth which appared in the back of his comic JOURNEY. A nice early work by Kieth, showing signs of where he'd go but much more restrained than he would be soon.


A relatively tame page from a truly bonkers Lobo story that Kieth did with Scott Ian.


This is a really fun cover, a tribute to classic 1948 Carl Barks cover.



The most recent page here, from the 2017 ELEANOR & THE EGRET with writer John Layman. 

EPICURUS THE SAGE, another work with William Messner-Loebs, has always been my favourite work of Kieth.  I wrote about it over here, I'll just add that, four years later, I like it even more.




A really nice fanzine cover, Kieth always had a way of interpreting existing characters in some distinctive ways which stayed true to their roots while looking like nothing you saw before.



From 1990, a nice interpretation of the Giger movie ALIEN xenomorphs, written by Mark Verheiden.



And finally from a 1986 issue of ANYTHING GOES, the earliest example of Kieth's writing I have, which does indeed make me feel a bit stupid, but that's not a bad thing.

Tatjana Wood, R.I.P.

Sorry to hear about the passing of comic book colourist Tatjana Wood, three days ago just before what would have been her 100th birthday today.  A mainstay at DC from the early 1970s to the early 2000s, a lot of her earliest work isn't documented since colouring credits weren't standard at DC until the 1980s.  Just to highlight a few key runs that are especially dear to my heart:

She coloured almost all of the original run of THE QUESTION by Denys Cowan and Dennis O'Neil, a run I've written about before.  She was a key part of what made that one of my favourite comics of all time, really bringing a distinct look to the physical action in the urban landscape.

She's probably most associated with SWAMP THING, having coloured something close to 200 stories of the character through many creative collaborations. Always excellent work, often called upon to deliver some really experimental work, especially through the Bissette/Totleben/Veitch years, which are full of effects I'm pretty sure had never been done in mainstream American comics before.

She was the colourist for most of the last few years of SGT. ROCK stories with writer/creator Robert Kanigher, editor Joe Kubert and a host of artists (on this page, Dan Spiegle).  Might be almost as much of those (and other war stories) as Swamp Thing, a lot were uncredited. 

One of her last regular assignments before retiring was most of Walter Simonson's run on ORION from 2000 to 2002.  A classic run, with some bold clear colouring matching the epic and bombastic nature of the storytelling being brought to the Kirby creations.

Some other noteworthy points from her body of work are WONDER WOMAN (with George Perez) CAMELOT 3000 (with Brian Bolland) and ANIMAL MAN (with Chas Troug, Steve Dillon, Steve Pugh and others). She was also the main colourist for DC's covers for quite a while in the 1970s and 1980s.

You can also find a nice sampling of Wood's colour guides on-line, which can be fascinating:

A couple of cautions, these colour guides were definitely made with tools and dyes not meant to hold their look for four decades. Also, the guides are just one part of some larger conversations, one between Wood and the colour separator, meant to convey what the mechanical procedure would be to get the effect she wants, and another between Wood and the printer, using her experience to know how what she puts on the page will translate to how the inks they use will look on the paper they use.  It's all the more impressive that colourists like her knew how to get the look they needed being so far removed from the final result.

Sal Buscema, R.I.P.

 Just heard of the passing of Sal Buscema at age 89.  A talented and prolific artist with a long career in comics, mostly at Marvel, with long runs on Spider-Man, Hulk, ROM, Captain America, Thor and Defenders, plus work on almost everything else at some point.

A couple of covers he drew:

Good mid-career interview with him in that issue of CI to go with the career spanning one in the TwoMorrows book (still available digitally).  That THOR cover is the only one he did on his run with Walter Simonson on the book in the 1980s, drawing most of the second half of Simonson's run, including the BALDER THE BRAVE mini-series.

And some interior pages

A page from the aforementioned BALDER mini-series with Simonson, maybe my favourite work of his.

A Christmas story featuring Jack Kirby's Orion and Highfather, also written by Simonson, from a brief late 1990s stint at DC where he mostly worked as an inker, but did a few pencils and even fewer full art jobs like this one.  I especially like the sequence at the bottom of this page.

Another Christmas story, this time from Marvel in the early 1990s, featuring the X-Men, written by Karl Bollers.

A 1970s page from THE INCREDIBLE HULK, maybe the character Buscema is most associated with, written by Bill Mantlo, one of his most frequent collaborators.

Another Mantlo collaboration, this one from ROM #1 in 1979, a character ostensibly based on a toy, but one where the comic book creators pretty much had to create all the back-story for.  

And another Simonson collaboration, from their final issue of THOR in 1987, an action packed conclusion to a classic run.

Stephen Bissette's TYRANT The Original Art Edition upcoming

Just announced from new publisher Lighthouse Press is S.R. BISSETTE'S TYRANT THE ORGINAL ART EDITION, an archival collection newly scanned from the original art of Stephen Bissette's classic but short-lived 4-issue series from 1994-1996, which just scratched the surface in the life story of a Tyrannosaurus rex in the late Cretaceous period.

There will be a crowd-funding campaign for the book early next year.  You can go here right now to sign up for information once the campaign is active.

Really good news, I can't think of a modern age comic that more deserves the format, and hopefully it'll lead to more material in the future.

EC - Destruction of the Earth (Feldstein)

Destruction of the Earth
by Al Feldstein
Weird Science #14[#3] (1950)

A scientist who helped develop the atom bomb approaches some government officials to warn them about the consequences that his calculations show for their upcoming hydrogen bomb test, which you can guess from the title of the story.  They dismiss his concerns and head down to the test in the Bikini Atoll.  Does not go well.

It's a little dry but well illustrated, with some interesting scenes, and a nice little twist in the last panel.

EC - The Sounds From Another World (Kurtzman)

The Sounds From Another World
by Harvey Kurtzman
Weird Science #14[#3] (1950)

Story swiped from a 1949 Roald Dahl short story "The Sound Machine", Kurtzman does a great job bringing the story to life.  It's about a scientist who is obsessed with building a machine that detects sounds beyond the limits of human perception. Hearing mysterious screams he investigates and begins to suspect that the only source must be the suffering plant life. Some great faces on a descent into madness by Kurtzman, and also the framing sequence is an original extrapolation of the Dahl story.

EC - Split Second! (Kamen)

Split Second!
art by Jack Kamen, story by Al Feldstein
Shock SuspenStories #4 (1952)

Steve Dixon, the mean-spirited boss of a remote lumber camp marries beautiful big city singer Liz and brings her to live at the camp, even though he doesn't allow any of the lumberjacks to bring their wives to live there.  She's soon bored and starts to cause trouble, but the lumberjacks know enough to avoid her.  Ted, a new young kid joins the camp, impressing everyone with his chopping skills which they hope will win them the upcoming big lumberjacking tourney.  Liz also sets her sights on him, bringing on the wrath of her husband. This leads to the usual revenge plot from the other lumberjacks.

Pretty story with the usual sexy woman, rugged men and lush backgrounds from Kamen, but the story is a bit cruel and doesn't age too well.