Or, maybe not buried, but still a treasure… By PETER STONE Neal Adams used to act out a story about the Mike Grell redesigned Green Arrow. He’d talk about the billowy sleeves firing a bow. (Anyone who has fired a bow knows this is a recipe for disaster.) Then he’d say, “Look! On your left!” And he would pretend to turn his head quickly, using his hand as the hood. Of course, he couldn’t see through the hood, so he’d say, “Where?! I can’t see it! Wait, I’ll have to take off the hood!” He would laugh and talk about why he designed Green Arrow the way he did. Grell, having taken over Green Arrow after Neal, once said to him as they were eating together at a convention, “Dammit, Neal. I’m always following you.” They both thought that was funny. That said, Neal liked Mike and respected his desire to tell his own stories outside the Big Two. Mike Grell didn’t want to be drafted during the Vietnam War, so he took matters into his own hands and joined the Air Force, where he served for four years. During this enrollment, he spent a certain amount of time as an illustrator in Saigon. Before he enlisted, Grell had completed the Famous Artists School correspondence course created by Albert Dorne and featuring Norman Rockwell as a contributing creator. The course sprang from the artists at New York’s Society of Illustrators and featured the likes of Austin Briggs, Robert Fawcett, Al Parker, and John Whitcomb. It’s not a mystery why Grell was attracted to it, having already studied at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and a strong desire to make his dream of being a working artist a reality. After his service and a stint working as Dale Messick’s assistant on Brenda Starr, he got work at DC Comics in the 1970s: Aquaman, the Phantom Stranger, Batman, the Legion of Super-Heroes, the first Batgirl-Robin story in Batman Family. He pencilled the revival of Neal and Denny O’Neil’s “Hard Traveling Heroes” — Green Lantern and Green Arrow. But Grell also delved into the world of creation. The Warlord became a fan favorite character… a man lost in a world much like Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Pellucidar. Travis Morgan was a modern-day man with a Thor-like helmet, a sword and .44 auto-mag....
From Kirby to Windsor-Smith… By PETER STONE In the mid-1970s, seven or eight years after the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Marvel Comics acquired the rights to the Stanley Kubrick epic. Jack Kirby adapted it in 1976 but didn’t want to follow the film exactly, so he was given free rein to frame the general story using the novel and an earlier version of the screenplay. HAL’s dialogue was more colloquial, and the main characters were more emotional. Then, despite Kirby’s reluctance to keep working on the project, he continued with a regular series that he designed, wrote, and pencilled. The premise was to search for the origins of the Monolith. The story continues in the Kirby fashion until Issue #8, when a character named Mister Machine, or X-51, becomes a major part of it. A doctor named Abel Stack saves X-51 from furious androids who have gained sentience and are attempting a revolt. Stack is later killed trying to remove an auto-destruct mechanism from X-51, and the android soon encounters the Monolith, allowing him to transcend his robot programming and begin to assimilate with humanity. He takes the name Aaron Stack and is known as Mister Machine until getting his own series, Machine Man, in 1978. (The name change was necessary because there was a toy called Mister Machine.) Kirby’s Machine Man series only lasted nine issues, but it was revived less than a year later by Marv Wolfman and Steve Ditko and ran for another 10 installments. The series has a cult following and served to integrate the character into the mainstream Marvel Universe, but Machine Man himself really bloomed several years later with a four-issue miniseries. The 1984 Machine Man featured a story by Tom DeFalco, rough layouts Herb Trimpe, and spectacular finishes and coloring by Barry Windsor-Smith. DeFalco tells a simple (and, yes, perhaps cliched) story of a collection of scavengers fighting to survive in a brutal, future robotic landscape ruled by one of Machine Man’s old villains. Trimpe was a workhorse whose best-known character was the Hulk. In the case of Machine Man, he seemed so busy with other titles and covers that he only provided the breakdowns for this four-issue series. Enter Windsor-Smith, best known for his epic run on Conan the Barbarian from 1970 to 1973 and one of the most...
Or, maybe not buried, but still a treasure…
A project that has not received the credit it’s due — and a few comments about working with Neal Adams…
A new take on an old legend — and much more than that…
