Some of the most-looked-at artwork in American comics was made by people almost nobody can name.
Gaspar Saladino lettered for DC and Marvel across a career of more than fifty years. He designed logos — hundreds of them — and if you grew up reading comics you have spent more hours looking at his handwriting than at the work of any artist you could name. House of Mystery. Swamp Thing. And this: the tall red A with the arrow driven through it, the Avengers logo, which debuts on this issue in February 1972 and stays at the top of the book for the better part of twenty years. He drew it once. It outlasted nearly everyone who worked on the title beneath it. He died in 2016, a few weeks short of his eighty-ninth birthday.
Underneath the logo is Neal Adams, and this is the last of the four issues he drew in the Kree-Skrull War.
That storyline is where Roy Thomas took a team book and made it into something closer to space opera — two ancient empires using Earth as a proxy battleground, a Skrull infiltration plot Marvel is still mining fifty years later, and a sense of scale that comics of the period rarely attempted. Adams came aboard for the back half and drew it at full stretch: the Vision rising off the cover with his fist cocked, Thor and Captain America and Iron Man scattering around him. Tom Palmer inked it, and Palmer’s finishes over Adams pencils are the reason this particular run looks the way it looks — heavier, wetter, closer to painting than to line.
“The Andromeda Swarm!” Annihilus cameos. Ronan and the Supreme Intelligence appear, along with Captain Marvel, Rick Jones, the Scarlet Witch, Quicksilver and Goliath.
CGC 9.2, off-white to white pages, in an older-generation holder — which has its own quiet following among collectors who remember when those cases were new.
Some of the most-looked-at artwork in American comics was made by people almost nobody can name.
Gaspar Saladino lettered for DC and Marvel across a career of more than fifty years. He designed logos — hundreds of them — and if you grew up reading comics you have spent more hours looking at his handwriting than at the work of any artist you could name. House of Mystery. Swamp Thing. And this: the tall red A with the arrow driven through it, the Avengers logo, which debuts on this issue in February 1972 and stays at the top of the book for the better part of twenty years. He drew it once. It outlasted nearly everyone who worked on the title beneath it. He died in 2016, a few weeks short of his eighty-ninth birthday.
Underneath the logo is Neal Adams, and this is the last of the four issues he drew in the Kree-Skrull War.
That storyline is where Roy Thomas took a team book and made it into something closer to space opera — two ancient empires using Earth as a proxy battleground, a Skrull infiltration plot Marvel is still mining fifty years later, and a sense of scale that comics of the period rarely attempted. Adams came aboard for the back half and drew it at full stretch: the Vision rising off the cover with his fist cocked, Thor and Captain America and Iron Man scattering around him. Tom Palmer inked it, and Palmer’s finishes over Adams pencils are the reason this particular run looks the way it looks — heavier, wetter, closer to painting than to line.
“The Andromeda Swarm!” Annihilus cameos. Ronan and the Supreme Intelligence appear, along with Captain Marvel, Rick Jones, the Scarlet Witch, Quicksilver and Goliath.
CGC 9.2, off-white to white pages, in an older-generation holder — which has its own quiet following among collectors who remember when those cases were new.
