Just A Semi-Swipe

I've been re-reading Jim Starlin's visionary sci-fi/hero series Warlock this week. It's one of my favorite post-'60s Marvel books, a heady, visually dazzling glob of dense imagination that just might be the closest thing to an art comic Marvel ever published. It feels like something that came from an alternate-world Marvel, one where Kirby's boundless expansionism and Ditko's full-bore weirdness were what got carried into the '70s to reach maturity -- as opposed to Stan Lee's shrift and consumerist pandering. This stuff would never be published by a mainstream outlet nowadays, it's too compressed, too impenetrable, too artsy, too nerdy, too personal, too druggy... too good. I highly recommend seeking it out; the only collection is a sixty dollar hardcover, but Marvel reprinted the entire saga as six double-sized issues in 1982, and then again in '92, so you can find plenty of cheap copies floating around.

I'll probably do the next Your Monday Panel on it if I can decide which panel to use. This comic is absolutely stuffed with great single-frame images, and almost always in unconventional page layout structures. It's very Jim Steranko-influenced that way: Starlin was one of a few '70s superhero artists (Marshall Rogers was another) who took Steranko as a jumping-off point, inspired by his ability to turn every panel into a composed, showstopping work of art while simultaneously designing beautiful full-page units. Of the Big Three Marvel Silver Age guys, Steranko is a distant third in terms of respect and influence these days, but I feel like there was a point somewhere in the '70s -- when Kirby was largely considered passe and Ditko was off doing creator-owned fascism comics -- that Steranko, the gargantuan talent who transformed comic art with a few perfect issues and then basically quit instead of fading away, was the main guy to emulate.

He certainly was for Starlin. I've been reading this series, having a blast digging the Jaunty Jim bits from the camera angles and color choices, when suddenly I recognized something quite familiar. I wrote a piece about this panel a while ago (now anthologized)...


... and here's a panel from Warlock issue #10:


I'll let you draw your own conclusions, but it raised my eyebrows a little.