Comments on: Comic Book Urban Legends Revealed #40!

By: Callum

Callum — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 16:44:05 +0000

..as you can clearly see by me misspelling ‘many’ and ‘before’..

By: Callum

Callum — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 16:43:25 +0000

Why did comic companies have to make twice as mayn copies beofre the direct market? It’s Friday and I’m not that bright just before the weekend. Thanks.

By: Zachary

Zachary — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 06:59:13 +0000

kevin: Believe me, he is. I read a few issues from Austen’s Superman run when it was released, and it was just dreadful. Tons of villians with no resolution, graphic violence, Supes throwing folks through windows, Lana Lang as a tramp…

…

Art was great, though.

By: kevin

kevin — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 22:54:23 +0000

just wondering, but why does everyone hate chuck austen so much?

By: Jim

Jim — Wed, 02 May 2007 19:17:45 +0000

Seeing the picture of the book with Captain 3-D on it, didn’t Americomics revamp Captain 3-D as Commando D? (Which then also ties in as a play on Kamandi, given Kirby’s connection to both.)

By: Brian Cronin

Brian Cronin — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 18:18:14 +0000

Thanks, Captain!

Yeah, I was pretty sure that the “consistent tone” thing was the case, but we can never have enough well-sourced material! Thanks again!

By: Captain Comics

Captain Comics — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 15:22:42 +0000

In answer to Eye-Melt and Clayton Emery:

The reason the Hulk became green with his second issue — technical problems with printing gray — are well-documented from a variety of sources, and not just Stan Lee (and his notoriously faulty memory).

For example, Les Daniels’s “Marvel: Five Fabulous Decades of the World’s Greatest Heroes” flatly states “the printer had trouble maintaining a consistent tone with (gray), and in the second issue The Bulk became green.”

And in Starlog #213 (Jul 03), the colorist of those issues, Stan Goldberg, was quoted as saying â€œStan wanted to try gray (on ‘Incredible Hulk’). I fought him on that. I told him it wouldn’t work, and it didn’t work, because we couldn’t keep the color consistent. Sometimes the Hulk was different shades of gray, and even green in one panel. If we hadnâ€™t already made The Thing orange, that would have been the perfect color for The Hulk.”

Every other reference I’ve seen to this issue in various histories has been in a similar vein.

By: Clayton Emery

Clayton Emery — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 12:25:48 +0000

Alan Moore once implied that the gray Hulk was objectionable to Southern retailers because he might be a “Negro”, as African-Americans were then called. So they went to green so he couldn’t be any normal human.

Moore mentioned this obliquely somewhere as a snide aside to Stan Lee caving in. Was it in the “1964″ comics?

It’s worth comparing Gabe from Sgt Fury’s Howling Commandos. He was AA, but was often colored gray, not brown. Maybe brown is another difficult color for a four-color press?

Clayton Emery
http://www.challengersoftheunknown.com

By: Skotti Kimble

Skotti Kimble — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 01:24:05 +0000

Ahhh Chuck you mutant. I gotta agree with Tom on what he said about Chuck’s inability to take the blame for anything.

Seriously….what he did to Nightcrawler earned his banning from Marvel alone.

By: Tom Galloway

Tom Galloway — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 21:01:07 +0000

I just love how Chuckles puts the blame on his blacklisting from DC on everyone but the real culprit: himself. He should have stuck to writing “Strips” and stayed away from the DC and Marvel books. His run on the X-Books was just as atrocious as his Superman run.

By: Markm

Markm — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 13:24:50 +0000

The problem with printing grey in comics was not limited to the Hulk. Look at most Batman comics up to about the mid 90′s. The covers almost always had Batman costume in a gray formed from solid black dots. On the interior pages, it was a muddier combination of the three printing color (cyan, magenta and yellow) with no black outside of the shading. The newsprint pages of comics couldn’t hold as fine a screen as the slick pages of the covers, so any true grey (which would have been applied by the artists in the form of Benday) might have “filled in” and shown as black.

I first noticed this when I was taking German classes in the 70′s, and thought it would be helpful to subscribe to the German edition of “Superman-Batman.” These were printed on slick paper throughout, and Batman was always in a purple costume.

By: Eye-melt

Eye-melt — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 20:56:06 +0000

Great stuff, as usual. Although I thought I read somewhere that the Hulk’s colour was changed because grey was a bit bland (also I think the page shown is from a re-coloured reprint, Marvel Masterworks or somesuch), but I could be wrong – you know how Stan the Man likes to ‘embellish’ his memories!