A Sense of Doubt blog post #1557 - Gil Kane - a great comic book artist and other comic book stuff

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1557 - Gil Kane - a great comic book artist and other comic book stuff

YESTERDAY, I had a great time nerding out talking comics with my new friend and comic book podcaster and historian extraordinaire, whose name I hesitate to share given the story he told me that had second hand from several Silver Age comic creators.

We shared opinions and stories. We visited two comic book shops in Portland -- Books With Pictures and Floating World Comics -- and perused back issues... BWP has a "curated" back issues bin!

I talked about two posts I had made recently, which are here:

TEN IMPORTANT COMIC BOOK COVERS - BLOG POST 1541

COMIC BOOKS ARE GOING DOWNHILL... NOT... BLOG POST 1439

My friend told me a disturbing story about Gil Kane, one of my all time favorite artists, who may have been an art thief, stealing original art from DC Comics, sometimes before it was published, and selling it on the black market. Many Silver Age creators have a low opinion of Gil Kane and this may be why. I hate to think it's true, but surely, it's possible.

Apparently, DC forced Kane to do penance by creating a humiliating, self-referential story in House of Mystery, a story and issue that I will explore more later.

For now, some celebration of the greatness that was Gil Kane. Many of the covers in my ten important covers were drawn by him and a few others goodies.

Happy Sunday.

https://comicsalliance.com/tribute-gil-kane/

Name a big-two superhero comic besides X-Men, and odds are Gil Kane worked on it.

And he didn't just work on superhero comics. He left his mark on them. After all, he drew one of the (if not the) most famous Spider-Man story of all time, "The Night Gwen Stacy Died." He co-created the Silver Age Green Lantern and Atom. He co-created Iron Fist. And that's just scratching the surface. Kane's bibliography runs as deep as any of his contemporaries. His birthday would have been this week.

Kane was born Eli Katz in Latvia on April 6, 1926. He didn't stay long--his family immigrated to New York when Kane was three. Soon enough he was working in comics. Kane told The Comics Journal that he was visiting comics offices by the time he was 15, where he'd run into artist Joe Kubert, who was also already working as a teenager:

My first job came the next year at 16. During my summer vacation, I went up and got a job working at MLJ in 1942 when Harry Shorten was the editor, and Scott Meredith nee Feldman was the associate editor. At that time Bob Montana had just started to create Archie for them because of the popularity of radio teenager Henry Aldrich. I started working in production and I worked there for three weeks but apparently they thought I was making too much noise and they fired me.

Even then, Kane had shifted from his birth name to his pen name.

He bounced back pretty quickly, picking up uncredited work for Atlas Comics and DC on war stories and Sandman mysteries. He even served as a ghost artist for Jack Kirby. Soon after, Kane was drafted to serve 19 months in the Army in the Pacific theater during World War II. Afterward, he almost immediately went back to work for DC on Sandman and Wildcat stories. By the end of the 1940s, he was working on Westerns and Rex the Wonder Dog comics for the company.

A decade later, DC would call on Kane to help design its new Silver Age superheroes. In the book DC Comics: Sixty Years of the World's Favorite Comic Book Heroes, Historian Les Daniels said Kane played a big role in defining the look of superheroes during the era: "The design was part of an approach that emphasized grace as well as strength, an approach especially notable in Kane's flying scenes... Green Lanternappeared to soar effortlessly across the cosmos."

Over the next few years, Kane would work on numerous other DC characters, all but redefining them for the era: Hawk and Dove, Plastic Man, the Teen Titans. He wasn't limited just to DC; he drew T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents for Tower Comics and Hulk stories in Marvel's Tales to Astonish. In 1968, Kane self-published a graphic novel (with some scripting help from Archie Goodwin) titled His Name Is... Savage, a sci-fi spy story that pushed boundaries for violence in comics at the time and was clearly influenced by thy spy cinema of the time.

By the 1970s, Kane was mostly working for Marvel, succeeding John Romita Sr. as the full-time penciler on Amazing Spider-Man. In addition to drawing the deaths of Gwen Stacy and the Green Goblin, Kane also pushed the envelope in a story written by Stan Lee, drawing an anti-drug story in issues #96-98. The issues dealt with the increasingly troubling pill addiction of Harry Osborn, and saw Spider-Man getting into scuffles with Harry's dealers. The Comics Code strictly forbade any mention of drugs, even negative, so Marvel published the issues without the Comics Code seal. After the issues were met with widespread approval, the Code was changed.

https://www.dynamite.com/htmlfiles/viewProduct.html?PRO=C72513021544408021

http://smashpages.net/2018/01/22/lost-kirby-kane-prisoner-comic-coming-from-titan-comics/

HEY KIDS, COMICS!! GIL KANE COVER GALLERY

https://13thdimension.com/13-covers-to-salute-gil-kane/

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower -1905.26 -10:10

- Days ago = 1422 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.