PAUL KUPPERBERG: My 13 Favorite Projects Working With DON NEWTON
A BIRTHDAY TRIBUTE: The celebrated Mr. K honors his sometime Bronze Age collaborator… — UPDATED 11/12/26: The late Don Newton was born 92 years ago, on Nov. 12, 1934. Perfect time to reprint this piece from his birthdate in 2021! Dig it. — Dan — By PAUL KUPPERBERG The only thing that could have made it easier selecting my 13 favorite stories drawn by Don Newton (November 12, 1934 — August 19, 1984) that I scripted or dialogued would have been if Don had actually done 13 of my stories instead of a mere 12. Missed it by that much! Still, since I loved just about anything Don drew, it wasn’t difficult to find a stray 13th tale for this birthday salute. I’ve always felt fortunate that Don drew as many of my stories at DC Comics as he did, beginning with Aquaman in 1978 and ending with a Tales of the Green Lantern Corps back-up in 1984, Don’s final story and, coincidentally, the only story at DC he got to both pencil and ink. It was a not-much-of-anything-happens kind of script, but Don transformed the six-page incident into a stunning, atmospheric set piece that went light years beyond my expectations when I wrote it. It was a little masterpiece, a fact recognized by no less an authority than Dick Giordano, who wrote in his obituary of the artist, “To my mind, Don’s final statement was the Green Lantern Corps story he penciled and inked that appeared in Green Lantern #181. He showed us how to do it right.” (Click here for the late Giordano’s full tribute.) I was aware of the Virginia-born Newton’s work long before he turned pro for Charlton Comics in 1974, about a year ahead of me. Don had been a mainstay of comics fanzines since the mid-1960s when his earliest work was first published by G.B. Love in a fanzine called The Golden Age. His painted covers and interior line art were soon making eyes pop all over fandom; it’s estimated his art graced more than 100 fanzines. Now living in Arizona, Don found it difficult to make any headway with the East Coast-based Marvel and DC Comics. These were the pre-internet, pre-FedEx days of publishing, when the U.S. Postal Service was the only alternative to hand delivery if an artist lived out of...
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