Ok, how about this for an idea. We take it in turns to post a favourite (British spelling) comic cover every day. This went really well on the comic fan website that I used to frequent. What we tried to do was find a theme or subject and follow that, until we all got bored with that theme. I'd like to propose a theme of letters of the alphabet. So, for the remainder of October (only 5 days) and all of November, we post comic cover pictures associated with the letter "A". Then in December, we post covers pertaining to the letter "B". The association to the letter can be as tenuous as you want it to be. For example I could post a cover from "Adventure Comics" or "Amazing Spider Man". However Spider Man covers can also be posted when we're on the letter "S". Adventure Comic covers could also be posted when we're on the letter "L" if they depict the Legion of Super Heroes. So, no real hard, fast rules - in fact the cleverer the interpretation of the letter, the better, as far as I'm concerned.
And it's not written in stone that we have to post a cover every day. There may be some days when no cover gets posted. There's nothing wrong with this, it just demonstrates that we all have lives to lead.
If everyone's in agreement I'd like to kick this off with one of my favourite Action Comic covers, from January 1967. Curt Swan really excelled himself here.
Discussion and voting on future monthly themes takes place on the "Nominations, Themes and Statistics for A Cover A Day" thread. Click here to view the thread.
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This is another early Curt Swan Boy Commandos doing his best Kirby imitation!
It's funny that Crazy Quilt lasted longer than his young foes by taking on Robin in Star Spangled Comics, thus becoming through a sidedoor a Batman villain!
So, February dawns at last and we get to honour the greatest Superman family artist the world has ever seen. I loved Curt's work and still do - he was second only to Neal Adams in my book.
A bit of background before we start.
Curt Swan was born in Minneapolis on February 17, 1920, the youngest of 5 children. Swan's Swedish grandmother had shortened and Americanized the original family name of Svensson. Father John Swan worked for the railroads; mother Leontine Jessie Hanson worked in a local hospital. As a boy, Swan's given name – Douglas – was shortened to "Doug," and, disliking the phonetic similarity to "Dog," Swan thereafter reversed the order of his given names and went by "Curtis Douglas," rather than "Douglas Curtis." He entered the comic industry in 1945 after being discharged from the armed forces and started working for DC. He was totally self-taught, apart from a few months night classes at the Pratt Institute under the G.I. Bill. Initially he drew and inked Boy Commandos but soon he was able to leave the inking to others and graduated to Tommy Tomorrow and Gang Busters. His first drawn cover seems a bit of a mystery - my Curt Swan biography by Eddy Zeno suggests it was Boy Commandos #20, but given the posts above it seems that it may well have been before then. I'll start my posts with Gangbusters #38 with a cover date of Feb 1954. The face in the foreground illustrates early traits of his work: thin lips and pronounced folds coming down from the sides of the nose.
Lois Lane #14. Not only is this a "14," it's a Curt Swan cover and one of the few Silver Age Lois pics that is almost sexy.
"Also, Superman, WTF are you doing flying uninvited through my bedroom window?"
From Swan's earliest covers to possibly his latest, one of the many variant covers for Action Comics #1000 (June 2018), which features this signed pencil sketch of the Man of Steel.
After John Byrne and Jerry Ordway took over as Superman's artists Post-Crisis, Curt Swan was given MASK, a licensed toy book. It was a move that saddened me at the time even though the argument was that he was getting royalty money but the book didn't last long. MASK was neither GI JOE nor Transformers.
Curt's first drawings of the Man of Steel occurred on the inside pages of Superboy #5 (Nov/Dec 1949) but at that time, there was little continuity between Superman and his earlier incarnation, so there was no necessity to make Superboy look anything like the fully grown adult. However Curt was finally let loose on the big guy on the cover of Three-Dimension Adventures of Superman, a one-off comic issued in November 1953. His first attempt isn't quite the Curt Swan Superman that we came to know and love but it wasn't far away.
In Eddy Zeno's biography, he selects this image below to define Curt's iconic style. I couldn't resist posting it here.
While a lot of inkers have graced Curt Swan's pencils, I personally think the best was Murphy Anderson. Below is some examples from the pre-Crisis Superman 247. The cover is courtesy of the Grand Comics Database while the interior pages are via Google images and it was one of the more moving stories from the introspective phase of Superman's career. It did appear a lot neater without all the empty white space before I posted it though.
Showcase #14. The fourth and final tryout for the Flash. If his Showcase covers were more exciting, maybe he wouldn't have needed four tryouts.
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