Monster Monday: Man-Thing 2013 commish by Art Adams

Take a look at the detail in this 2013 commission by Art Adams featuring the macabre Man-Thing:

Nuff Said!

Two Visions of Galactus by Kirby and Adams

Two visions of Galactus, one a classic, the other retro cool!

I believe this illustration was done for a portfolio?  I can't quite remember now, but I remember first seeing it in a Jack Kirby treasury of his larger pieces.

An Art Adams commission, done in 2009 featuring a closeup of that giant-sized head piece.  Nuff Said!

Fantastic Four homage cover by Art Adams

I haven't read Fantastic Four regularly since Mark Waid left, so I was a bit startled to come across this 2010 cover that Art Adams produced for the 600th issue.

Featuring both the FF and the Inhumans racing off to fight an unseen foe!  I immediately recognized the source and appreciated the homage.

The original pen and ink version of Art Adams cover features delicate line work as always.

Of course the homage is to Jack Kirby's famous FF #82 cover featuring the Inhumans, back in 1986!  One of my favorites.  Nuff Said!

X-Men Battle of the Atom original art covers by Art Adams

The Battle of the Atom mini-series ended last year, which seemed to be an excessive crossover for me.  But it had some great artwork, most notably the covers by Art Adams.  Here are three of them in the original pen and ink versions.

X-Men Battle of the Atom #3 featured this great cover with young Jean Grey and Scott Summers on the run.  I love, love, love how this looks in black and white.  The costumes look nice and the circle/line perspective really draws your attention to the characters.

Battle of the Atom #4 featured Magneto as he threatens the younger X-Men.  Who doesn't like a Magneto pose?  Rogue is standing next to him, too.

The first issue had this dramatic collage of old and new teams with the threat of the Sentinels in the background.  The Angel looks majestic the way that Adams draws him here.  Nuff Said!

Thing Tuesday: The Thing and Valkyrie by Art Adams

How can someone so big sneak up on an Asgardian shield maiden?

Famous pulp quote:  He's a big man, but he moves like a cat!  Nuff Said.

Giant-Sized X-Men 50th Anniversary Jam Poster

If any image deserved the monicker "Giant-Size", surely it is this incredible poster jam featuring the X-Men!

Drawn by many classic artists throughout X-Men history, many of my favorites:

• Walter Simonson (on the upper left) with X-Factor
• Neal Adams (upper middle) with his Silver Age team, including Havok
• Art Adams drawing the New Mutants from that classic Special Edition
• Chris Bachalo with Generation X
• Stuart Immonen drawing the original blue and yellow uniforms on the lower right
• Even Joe Mad and While Portacio

Great poster!  Would love to have had John Byrne or Jim Lee draw something here, but given the circumstances I can see why they are not included.  Anyone know when it will be sold on retail?  I've been searching and cannot find it for sale yet.  Nuff Said!

Monster Monday: Tomb of Dracula and Frankenstein by Art Adams

This nifty cover by Art Adams in 2010 slipped right by me, featuring 2 classic Marvel Monsters...

Dracula vs Frankenstein for the the Tomb of Dracula Omnibus #3 in 2010. Wow! 

Nuff Said!

Monster Monday: Infernal Man-Thing covers by Art Adams

Next month Marvel is publishing a three-issue mini-series with Steve Gerber's last Man-Thing script, a sequel to the classic "Song Cry of the Living Dead Man" that appeared in MT #12 (1974).  Who is doing the covers for this new series?

Art Adams!  A natural choice since he has done many great commissions of Manny over the years.  This is the cover to Infernal Man-Thing #1.  It reminds a bit of Mike Ploog, with the water and slime dripping down his head.

Infernal Man-Thing #2 shows the swamp creature reaching out to touch someone, probably because they are afraid!  Whosoever Knows Fear...Burns at the Man-Thing's Touch.

Infernal Man-Thing #3 shows the creature ready for action.  This is very similar to the cover for Thunderbolts #154 from last year.  Great covers for a character that is finally getting some attention here and in Jeff Parker's Thunderbolts series.  Nuff Said!

Monster Monday: Art Adams Man-Thing pin-up re-mastered as Thunderbolts variant cover!

I have featured this Man-Thing pin-up by Art Adams on more than one occasion. I think it’s a great rendition of Marvel’s muck-monster.  Now Marvel has decided to use this great pin-up as the alternate cover for Thunderbolts #154 (coming in March 2011). Wow!  I didn’t think this would look good in color, but I was wrong.  The colorist went berserk filling in all kinds of details on Manny’s body.  I love the fog at the creature’s knees.

Here’s the original pin-up, which I originally featured back in 2008.  Man-Thing rules!  Nuff Said.

Four great Man-Thing pinups by Art Adams, Neal Adams, Vicent Alacazar, and Jim Starlin

Whosoever knows Fear burns at the Man-Things touch!  And these artists burn quite hard for Marvel’s favorite muck-monster. 



Art Adams drew this Man-Thing pinup for a commission in 2004.



This pinup of Man-Thing appeared in Neal Adams 2008 sketchbook.  I just love that overhead angle looking down at him.



This illuminating pinup by Vicente Alacazar appeared in Marvel Preview 8 magazine, 1976.  That kid really needs to be brave and not fearful.



Rampaging Hulk #7 magazine featured this pinup by Jim Starlin and Ernie Chan.
Note to Satanists, Death cultists, racist rednecks, murdering thugs, FoolKillers and evildoers:  Do not get stuck in the Florida everglades this Halloween!  Nuff Said!

Update: Comments from my old MT blog...

2 Comments

By Sanctum Sanctorum Comix on December 24, 2010 11:14 AM

Sweet.
I remember the bottom two from their respective publications.

However, did you know that the Neil Adams piece was also used as the cover to "Strange Tales" v4 (1998) # 2
( http://www.comics.org/issue/62213/cover/4/ )

And that Arthur Adams illo is to be the cover for THUNDERBOLTS # 154

http://www.comicbookresources.com/news/preview2.php?image=solicits/marvelcomics/201103/TBOLTS154_covcol.jpg

Just helping out.

~P~

By Richard Guion on December 26, 2010 7:40 PM

No idea the Adams piece was used on the Strange Tales cover, thanks for showing me that! Yeah, I did see in the recent Marvel solicits that the Art Adams Man-Thing piece would be the alternative cover for Thunderbolts. That was an easy choice for Marvel.

Classic Marvel: Stunning Posters by Adams, Golden, Finch, and Ross

Here are five posters featuring the Marvel Universe's greatest characters that no true believer can deny are superb!  Four of them I have featured previously, but the first one I believe is new to my site...



Arthur Adams produced the "Marvel Heroes and Villains" lithograph for Dynamic Forces.  We could easily peg these versions of Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, Avengers, X-Men, and their various villains in the mid 1960s era.  You've got Daredevil standing next to Black Widow, that edges you in the 1970 territory.  :-)



Golden drew this poster of the Marvel Universe in the 1970s.  It actually may have come out around 1980 or so--Moon Knight is featured, and he wasn't popular until the late 70s with his series starting in 1980.  But it's very 70s in spirit, with the All-New X-Men, Storm's classic costume, the Avengers (just love the Vision sinking into the ground), Black Bolt, Hulk, Doc Strange, Silver Surfer, and the Watcher on the left.  There's a few Marvel Monsters with Ghost Rider and Man-Thing.  Heck, even Ka-Zar, Luke Cage, and Captain Universe are in there.



Golden also drew this print that was featured in a 1980s Marvel Calendar.  You can immediately see the difference in this post-Secret Wars era, with Spidey's black costume, Beta Ray Bill, Grey Hulk Joe Fixit, New Mutants, Archangel, and Iron Man's armor that he donned in IM #200.  Note also the prominence of Daredevil and Elektra due to Frank Miller's work on the series.  The Punisher, another top seller, is also in the background.  Beyond the characters, the awesome sauce is the setting--the heroes in front of the Pan-Am building and crawling around the statue in front.



Alex Ross produced this cover for the Marvel Comics Encyclopedia.



This widescreen poster by David Finch, collecting all of his covers from X-Men Legacy, will be arriving in comic stores this June.  Didn't read the series, but this image is stunning.  Classic X-Men and New X-Men as bookends, with Sentinels, Hellfire Club, and Magneto sandwiched in-between.  Nuff Said!

Art Adams Classic Avengers Covers Showcase the Hulk

In the back of the newly re-launched Avengers titles, Brian Bendis is writing an Oral History of the Avengers.  Sort of a documentary approach to the Avengers history--what if every person connected with the team was interviewed?  It's very interesting, and somewhat controversial.  Best of all, this backup allows Marvel to showcase some great covers and illustrations from the past, including Art Adams covers to the Avengers Classics reprint series.



These illustrations are from Avengers Classics #1-3, showcasing the Hulk on cover, when he was briefly part of the team.  Here the Space Phantom impersonates the Hulk and attacks Thor, Iron Man, Ant-Man and the Wasp.  Which ticked off everyone to no end and made for the Hulk's early exit.  Iron Man is still in his "bucket-head" early armor, while Hank Pym upgraded himself from Ant-Man to Giant-Man.



The Hulk didn't go quietly--in the third issue he teamed up with Namor the Sub-Mariner to fight the Avengers.  Iron Man gets a new suit of armor--my favorite--with the pointed tips of the mask rising above his head.  I bought Randy Bowen's statue of this armor and I love it.

I really thought the Hulk was a lot fun in the Avengers.  He's a walking gamma bomb of chaos and unpredictability.  As Tony Stark says in the Oral History, "He was like a big, big, big dog on a leash.  Just take the muzzle off and let him loose."  It wasn't until The Defenders that we got the thrill of seeing the Hulk in a regular team book.

With all these new Avengers teams, Marvel tries to think out of the box and put in characters like Spider-Man and Wolverine that were previously off limits.  It looks like Wolverine and Hawkeye are pulling double duty on two teams.  Why not recruit the Hulk?  Nuff Said.

Update: Comments from my old MT blog...

7 Comments

By Dphunkt001 on July 11, 2010 1:57 PM

glad yo have you back. ive been perusing the backlog of Starlord posts lately till you made it back. i think ive got #'s 1-4 of this series, mostly picked for the covers. the water-colored looking back strips werent bad either. wondering if youve caught the cover for Marvel Adventures Hulk #13 - it was a great take on a classic cover. the classic cover escapes me, but it has to be on the timeline that these reprints covered. im sure you can find the original art - as the final has a marvelkids.com logo plastered on. also remember a discussion online about the #1 cover featured here, that had 2 different Ant-Man(s). think it was decided that 1 was the Lang version. really amazed how many characters are stuffed in there though.

By dusty abell on July 12, 2010 6:16 PM

glad you're back posting on giantsizemarvel, i found your site a few months ago and have enjoyed it immensely. I was getting worried when i bagan to notice no new updates in a while, i'm happy with todays post, the first issue cover is one of my alltime favorite art pieces, tim townsend owns that sucker now! i wish art was drawing books like this or fantastic four instead of ultimate x....his work is still so amazing i hate to see it wasted on a series i'm just not that excited about.

dusty abell

By Richard Guion on July 12, 2010 9:09 PM

Thanks for your comment and letting me know about Marvel Adventures Hulk. I will have to find those!

By Richard Guion on July 14, 2010 4:57 PM

Wow, thank you Dusty! I am a fan of yours as well, love that stuff on deviant Art!

By Anthony on July 15, 2010 6:31 PM

Really good to have you back. I purchased this series only for the
Art Adams covers as well. Just like I did when he did the covers for Dark Horse Comics Godzilla reprint series way back.

By Dphunkt001 on July 20, 2010 12:36 PM

sorry to be so late getting back, but i found a small scan of the cover (the final has HULK stamped over the Avengers logo, and that sticker looking paste-job over for marvelkids.com) at :

http://www.nerdcore.de/wp/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/marveladventureshulk13-01.jpg

and i should have realized its a decent take of the Avenger #1 cover.

By Richard Guion on July 21, 2010 10:38 AM

Thanks! I looked this up before as well and saw the Avengers #1 parody. :-)

Storm's Journey, From Goddess to Punk to Princess

I had to struggle to think for awhile about who was my favorite African-American Superheroine.  Misty Knight?  Photon/Captain Marvel?  There aren't that many major players in this category.  Then the answer hit me, so obvious: Storm (Ororo) from the X-Men!



I really like this cover to Classic X-Men #3 by Arthur Adams.  This was a month in which all Marvel Comics featured a character portrait on the cover.  Adams, who was always great at drawing Storm (more later), captures her nobility and innocence at the same time.

In the early adventures of the new X-Men, Storm was a supporting character.  Sure, we knew she could fly, zap bad guys with lighting bolts and exclaim "Goddess!" when the shit hit the fan.  What I liked was Storm's inhibitions.  She would come home to the X-Mansion and immediately shed her clothes.  Hey, I was going through puberty, and scenes like this one in X-Men #109 with Peter at the lake helped out a lot.  You can tell what Peter is looking at and thinking about in this scene.  No wonder he has no words to describe his homeland, he's thinking about doing the nasty with Storm!

After reading this issue, I kept expecting Storm to have a romance with Colossus.  That never happened.  The X-Men thrived on romance triangles, and I was surprised that Claremont never put Storm in this situation.



Storm had a few weaknesses to overcome: mainly her naiveté with city-life and claustrophobia.  She could have been written off as simply eye-candy.

But Chris Claremont loves strong female characters, and had a bigger character arc in mind. 

Storm started to come into her own character after the death of Phoenix.  Scott Summers left the team and Ororo took over as leader.  I remember all the guys in my local comic shop hated this idea with all the intensity of Rush Limbaugh's dislike for Bill Clinton!  Yet this led to Storm's defining moment in X-Men #170 (1983) when the team was trapped in the lair of the underground Morlocks.



Callisto, the leader of the Morlocks, was holding Kitty Pryde hostage.  There ain't nothing more you can do to piss off Storm than to threaten Kitty.  Callisto challenges Storm to a knife fight, with Kitty as the prize.  This fight was well choreographed by artist Paul Smith.  Callisto, who looks like she learned knife fighting in Brazil, gets in a few slices on Ororo.  Then Storm displays a cold-blooded streak of intelligence when she stabs Callisto and calmly walks away, proclaiming herself the leader of the Morlocks!

After this event, we would no longer view Storm as a naive young woman.  We knew she would go to any lengths to protect the mutants on her team. 

This was all happening during a great era for the X-Men.  Claremont and Smith were firing on all cylinders.  We were shocked when this led to Storm's transformation in X-Men #173 when she became a punk!  Again, most of the guys in my LCS hated this punk look, with the mohawk haircut, leather outfit, and studded collar.  I secretly thought it was totally kinky and hot.  I just love the 1980s and this was one of the highpoints of that decade.

Paul Smith mentioned this remake in an interview done for Marvel Spotlight Uncanny X-Men 500 issues celebration:  Oh my god, that was just a bad joke gone too far!  I knew they were gonna cut the hair, so I did a number of head sketches with varying short hair sytles and as a joke--as a joke--I put a Mr. T Mohawk on her.  Louise Simonson (the editor) looked at it and said, "You know we're gonna get hung no matter what we do, so let's commit the crime!"  So we went with the Mohawk.  I went ahead and switched to the Wendy O. Williams (of the Plasmatics) style instead, more free flowing.  But once you get into that, you had to get into the whole leather and stud thing.  So it was just a bad joke that got way out of hand.




Mohawk Storm was used to great affect in the Uncanny X-Men Annual #9 in 1985.  This was the second half of the great Asgardian two-part epic (that began in New Mutants Special #1) drawn by Arthur Adams.  The cover features Storm swinging an Asgardian hammer in a very Kirby-inspired Thor-like pose.  Notice how Storm's mohawk works so nicely in the middle of that winged helmet.



Storm is the object of Loki's master plan in this storyline, seducing her with power and brainwashing her to fight her fellow mutants.  Loki creates an Asgardian hammer for Storm, which she wields in this sequence, where Adams competes with another Asgardian artist--Walt Simonson.

There are many other adventures of Storm, but for me, these early ones really stand out in my memory.  There was a backup in Marvel Team-Up #100 (1980) featuring Storm meeting the Black Panther in her youth.  This was later used as the spark to get these two married.  Ororo's profile in the X-Men universe has diminished somewhat as a result, but it's interesting to see her working with the team again in Astonishing X-Men.  Nuff said.

Update: Comments from my old MT blog...

2 Comments

By becca on February 15, 2009 11:44 PM

Awesome post!

you know your African-American superheroines - and Storm is definitely the first that comes to mind. She's one of my favorite characters.

By Von DEWS! on September 17, 2010 2:55 PM

Storm vs Cyclops fighting for leadership of the team in The Uncanny X-Men #201 wsa a great moment of the character, too!
http://media.comicvine.com/uploads/0/4/23698-3092-26413-1-uncanny-x-men-the_super.jpg

Jeff Loeb Brings Back the Lady Liberators in Hulk

You have to hand it to Jeff Loeb: he crafts a story that is really simpatico with the artists that he is working with.  In the case of Hulk #7-9, he’s got two artists to please, Arthur Adams and Frank Cho.  Adams gets monsters aplenty to draw, with an army of Wendigos, and a little cheesecake in the form of Ms. Marvel.  Frank Cho gets to draw just about every hot superbabe in the Marvel Universe.  If having She-Hulk, Thundra, and Valkyrie in mortal combat with the Red Hulk didn’t score high enough on the cheesecake scale, having Spider-Woman, Sue Richards, Tigra, Storm, Black Widow, and Hellcat appear will make it fly off the charts.

Even better is one of the covers for Hulk #9, showing the return of the Lady Liberators.  “All right, girls, that finishes off this male chauvinist pig!”  This is all a wink and a nod back to the classic Marvel of the 1970s era…

Avengers #83 was Roy Thomas’ nod to the burgeoning Women’s Liberation movement.  He had Valkyrie, Scarlet Witch, Black Widow, the Wasp, and Medusa team up to kick butt.  Of course, they were manipulated into attacking their team-mates by the evil Enchantress.  At the end of the story, Wanda says to Clint Barton: “One of these days, the Liberators will stage a comeback!”  Indeed, they have, almost 40 years later.  Nuff said.

Monster Mondays: Art Adams' Man-Thing

Art Adams' Man-Thing.  Sounds kind of disgusting, but it's a beautiful work of art!  You can check out Mr. Adams's Fog City Art Exchange website for more amazing images.

Nuff said.