Longtime readers of my musings will recall that my writing partner, Karen, is far more attuned to the work of Jim Starlin than am I. Relatively speaking, I'm a newcomer to appreciating Starlin's cosmic sagas in the Marvel Universe.I think it must have been budgetary concerns (hey, a kid only has so many quarters!) in my youth that caused me to skip the Captain Marvel and Warlock comics of the early-mid Bronze Age. I'd wager that my only exposure to Starlin's art as a child were a few issues he did on Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes and of course the immortal Avengers Annual #7 (but even then, I didn't read Marvel Two-In-One Annual #2 until years and years later!). I have since made up for this transgression against one of the all-time greats, acquiring numerous trade paperbacks and hardcover collections that reprint his work. I have especially enjoyed the massive Avengers vs. Thanos tpb, which made a nice tutorial ahead of the latter Marvel Cinematic Universe films.
Starlin also had a turn at DC, but my encounters with him across the 1980s often saw him in the writer's chair.
Enjoy today's sampling of his characters and his line art. And as always, I make no claim to any of these images, but am appreciative to those friends around the Internet who make them available so that we all might enjoy.
Yeah, I always liked Starlin's art, especially on the cosmic stuff. His writing doesn't always work for me; his Warlock series was a bit too esoteric for me (or maybe I'm just too stupid to get what Starlin's trying to say!). He tended to recycle ideas too ... I've noticed some of his DC writing (like Starman in DC Presents) is basically a retread of the Thanos/Warlock stuff.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed his work on Dreadstar. Ahead of his time with that one.
ReplyDeleteI like pretty much all of Starlin's work at Marvel, but his work at DC is mixed bag for me. I did not like what I read of his run as Batman scribe, and wasn't too fond of Cosmic Odyssey or Gilgamesh II, either. (By the way, Mike, Starlin did the art in those stories in DC Comics Presents, e.g. the story you referred to with Starman was written by Paul Levitz.)
ReplyDeleteThese art samples are great, Doug. They kind of make me want to pull out either the respective Warlock or Captain Marvel stuff for a nice re-read, but then I remember all of the piles of stuff still waiting to be read at all...