PAUL KUPPERBERG: My 13 Favorite JOE GIELLA Stories
Paying tribute to the late artist, whose career spanned the Golden, Silver and Bronze Ages… — UPDATED 3/22/23: Joe Giella has died at the age of 94, his family announced Wednesday. This piece ran on his birthday in 2022, in slightly different form. We present it again today. — Dan — By PAUL KUPPERBERG Joe Giella (born 94 years ago on June 27, 1928) seemed to be the inker of practically every DC comic book I loved as a kid and later, after I had achieved adulthood (according to the calendar anyway), he was assigned to ink a number of stories I wrote. He’s listed on Mike’s Amazing World of Comics (http://www.mikesamazingworld.com/mikes/index.php) as comics’ 11th most prolific inker even though he was largely retired from regular work by 1984, 38 years ago (my Adventures of Superboy looks to be his last regularly assigned book). Joe got his start in 1947, long before I was aware that either he or comic books even existed, inking features like Black Canary, Johnny Thunder, Wildcat, Jimmy Wakely, the JSA, King Faraday (in Danger Trail), the Trigger Twins, Knights of the Galaxy, the Phantom Stranger, Captain Comet, Detective Chimp, Hopalong Cassidy… not to mention scores of one-off science fiction, war, Western, and other genre stories. There were a couple of constants throughout Joe’s career. One was that he did 98 percent of his work for DC Comics, with a few Marvel jobs scattered over the years, some Archie Comics work (on their Mighty Heroes line in the ’60s), and credits on a handful of stories for Tower Comics. Another was that probably 60 percent of the work he did at DC he did for editor Julie Schwartz, and likely 50 percent of those jobs was his inking over Carmine Infantino. You can learn more about the fascinating life of this comics legend (who I was fortunate enough to meet on a couple of occasions at Terrificon) here, but the best way for his fans to celebrate his 94th birthday is by celebrating his work! Here then, MY 13 FAVORITE JOE GIELLA STORIES: — The Flash #123 (Sept. 1961). As I’ve noted often in this space, “The Flash of Two Worlds” is one of the most important stories of DC’s Silver Age, introducing the concept of the Multiverse into the DCU. It’s also the story...
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