Ernie Colón, Curt Swan, George Perez, and Jim Starlin were the artists whose work bit me. Like a lot of people in comics, I got the comics-making bug at around the ten- or eleven-years old mark. Being second oldest in a large family meant I didn’t have much space for peaceful reading, so I dragged my box of comics into the back seat of my parents’ parked car, reading and rereading Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld, Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen, Crisis on Infinite Earths, and Dreadstar. I’d stare at their work for hours, wondering how they made every image so engrossing.
But Sal Buscema was the first artist I intentionally copied. His art invited me to stop wondering and start reaching.
I was fourteen when I came across this issue of The Spectacular Spider-Man. It was on a spinner rack near the frozen food section at Ric’s supermarket in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan:
I had fallen in love with Spider-Man after coming across Todd McFarlane’s run on The Amazing Spider-Man. All of my comics friends loved McFarlane–his art gave us an exciting and dynamic take on Spidey we hadn’t seen before. Of course, the most talented of us could copy McFarlane’s style perfectly. Nailing Mysterio’s billowing cape, or drawing the most coiling webs around Spidey’s hip-breaking pose would make you head guy of our little geek club.
But this cover marked a turning point for me. Fourteen-year-old Jerzy wouldn’t be able to describe it this way, but there was something about the roughness of the lines, the drama of the almost graphical blocks of black, and the just-about-to-explode-with-energy poses in Sal Buscema’s work that arrested me. That’s what it was–what Joseph Campbell called aesthetic arrest. I didn’t have words, just a sharp drawing of breath and a big, big feeling. His pages were loaded with the emo intensity that made me fall in love with Spidey in the first place, but there was a joyfulness just behind the intensity. I felt like I was looking at art by a guy who had fun making it. I had to figure out what made this guy’s work tick. I had to do whatever it is he was doing.
The chase began right then and there. Not long after reading that issue I started drawing, trying to capture the fire I felt when reading Buscema’s comics. The page structures are a crude attempt to follow McFarlane’s layouts, while the inking style is an equally crude guess at what made Buscema’s work so beautiful:
That’s just felt-tip pen on some tabloid copy paper. I displayed these in a high school art show, and used non-archival materials to mount them. Hence the yellowing.
It’s those last two shots of J. Jonah Jameson that are the clearest signs of my aping. I loved the way he drew faces, especially Jonah.
Looking back I’m happy that the kid began his artistic reaching through pages of sequential art. He could have been satisfied to do the occasional fan art to wow the kids in his Spidey peer group, but he started the journey with full-on comics pages. Many more pages were made before graduating high school. He had an intuition that the only way to decode what Buscema was doing was to draw a bunch of pages.
Years later my visual style evolved, but I hadn’t quit chasing Buscema. Back in 2004 when I posted this page from The Front: Rebirth webcomic I made sure to credit him as inspiration for the punch on panel four:
Sal Buscema passed away on January 24, just before his 90th birthday. I never got to meet him to say this, but I’m so grateful for the invitation his work offered and continues to offer me. He made me want to reach and have fun doing it.
