Posted By Dan Greenfield on Mar 26, 2025 | 2 comments

A BIRTHDAY SALUTE…

By WALT GROGAN

Way back in 1981, comics artist Brian Bolland — born 74 years ago, on March 26, 1951 — drew an awesome conglomeration of heroes for the fanzine Two Decades of Comics: A Review:

What’s simply delightful about this piece of mostly headshots floating out of, presumably, the aforementioned Two Decades of Comics, are the choices Bolland made for inclusion — both popular as well as deep cuts!

When Gus Ceballos posted the art in the Back Issue Magazine Facebook group (and challenged its members to name all the characters), I couldn’t resist giving this very bombastic Bolland piece a retro coloring job!

There’s Marvel’s Red Sonja hanging out next to Atlas/Seaboard’s Tarantula! Marvel’s Howard the Duck looms over DC’s blockhead, Lead of the Metal Men! Sgt. Rock takes a gander at Marvel’s Storm! And who knows how Charlton’s Peacemaker might destroy DC’s Demon!

And what’s really cool is that Brian skewed the headshots as close to the original artists’ depictions as possible while rendering DC’s Brother Power the Geek, Charlton’s Nightshade and Gold Key’s Turok, Son of Stone in his own early, yet unmistakable, style!

The illustration was later reused as the inside cover for FantaCo’s Chronicles Series Annual #1 from 1983. Here it is, in its black-and-white glory:

—

MORE

— 13 COVERS: THE FLASH of BRIAN BOLLAND. Click here.

— 13 COVERS: The WONDER WOMAN of BRIAN BOLLAND. Click here.

—

A 10-year-old Walt Grogan fell in love with the Big Red Cheese thanks to essays written by Dick Lupoff and Don Thompson in the paperback edition of All in Color for a Dime, released in 1970 and bought for him by his father off a paperback spinner rack in a liquor store on the South Side of Chicago. Walt runs The Marvel Family Web Facebook page devoted to all incarnations of the Fawcett/DC Captain Marvel and blogs about Captain Marvel at shazamshistorama.com. He also runs the Robin: The Grown-Up Boy Wonder of Earth-Two! Facebook page.