Fanboy Rampage
By
Jeff Lester

You know what I miss? I'll tell you what I miss. John Buscema. Oh, sure, I've capped on the guy before, I admit it; he had a way of drawing the same ten panels, over and over, for pretty much the last thirty years. You weren't going to see any great storytelling innovations with Buscema. Like a well-trained lab rat, he knew the fastest way through the maze of script or plot, and it wasn't hard to imagine him cranking out an issue in a day or two, giving him time to get back to golfing or painting delicate oils of flowers or bowls of apples or landscapes, stuff he wouldn't have bothered to put in his comics work unless the plot explicitly called for it. But, for my money, if the artists of the '90s had managed to hack it out as well as Big John could, I think there'd still be a lot more readers in comics today.

This doesn't sound like the most honorific eulogy, I know, but I'm trying to be honest here. One of the great things about Buscema was that unlike most of the comics artists today, he never left out drawing something because he couldn't—only because he couldn't be bothered. But when he had to draw a city, or a car, or work a difficult perspective, it was all there and it was all strong, good stuff (even if the cars probably stopped being up-to-date around 1969). And he never skimped on faces—even if they were the same seven or eight expressions, each of those expressions were fully rendered each time—in fact, it's the faces I remember the most about Buscema's work, the faces and the body language which, again, although repeated over and over thousands of times through the arc of his career, managed to remain almost luridly expressive.

Although I'm sure, being the Marvel junkie that I was, I was exposed to his work dozens and dozens of times, it was Buscema's work on Conan that made its first, and of course deepest, impression on me. I had missed the Barry Smith years by a long shot, and although you'd have to be a blind man to not appreciate Smith's fevered intoxication, it's at the opposite end of the spectrum from Buscema and the discipline and control Buscema would bust out on Conan month after month after month. Whether he bothered to or not (and I suspect not), Buscema perfectly caught the "will to power" that gives the Conan stories their resonance—Buscema, like Conan, seemed to care the most about getting the job done and getting paid, and that comes through in the storytelling, which is all about drive and forward movement. (If John Buscema ever lingered over a drawing of his, taking the time to give it an extra bit of ink or detail because he liked the look of it, it was long before I picked up a book of his.) The eye never gets confused reading a Buscema story—it just rolls right forward.

Which is why I think that Stan would've picked Buscema to illustrate How To Draw the Marvel Comics Way even if Kirby had been willing and available. It didn't matter that Buscema, like almost everyone else at Marvel, had learned how to tell stories "the Marvel way" by looking at Kirby's work; Buscema's work had none of the anatomic oddness Kirby's work sometimes had, none of the oddball plotting and nearly absent-minded commitment to spectacle that Kirby could give. With the exception of when Kirby was inked by Sinnott, Kirby's work always had some odd unfinished edge to it, something that never quite gibed. No matter how smooth he made his work (and again, I would exclude his work with Sinnott from this), Kirby's passion and his energy always gave his work a raw edge, something that would stand out. Buscema, on the other hand, had managed to mimic some of the energy and much of the style without ever looking less than polished. Both John Buscema and Sal Buscema at their height managed to convey nearly all of the power, impact and weightiness of Kirby at his peak without nearly as much fuss or originality—it always looked suitably labored over without drawing attention to itself, which I think made Buscema's art the perfect counterpoint to Stan Lee's similarly energetic, yet mannered, scripting tics: reading the Lee/Buscema issues of Silver Surfer is like watching two ham actors chew every piece of scenery in sight, even though they're doing it mainly to put on a good show, rather than from any actual passion. And that's what Drawing Comics the Marvel Way is all about.

Still, I think all of this double-damning-with-faint-praise is unfair to John Buscema, no matter how accurate, because it doesn't really acknowledge how Buscema married his influences so successfully. Because his stories move with a such a pared-down speed, his storytelling skills are far superior to his big influences, Hal Foster, Alex Raymond, and Burne Hogarth. And because his grasp of anatomy, body language and composition are so strong, even his most melodramatic panels don't seem labored or even particularly awkward. Despite my love for Gil Kane's work, I can't help but feel that Buscema easily did what Kane tried so hard to do, blending Kirby's dynamicism with the others' rock-firm understanding of anatomy and body language.

In fact, here's a dark secret: out of the horrible project that is Just Imagine Stan Lee Raping and Pillaging The DC Universe, I really enjoyed the issue where he and Buscema had a go at Superman. There, as clear as the chimes of a churchyard bell, was Buscema's love of Alex Raymond (Superman was a blonde guy in a red shirt with a cape) for everyone to see. Every once in a while, no more than a panel, I felt like I was reading an actual comic from the '40s, crude and dumb and almost amateurish, but also with a genuine potential, something capable of exciting me, to it. It was the first time in Stan's awful undertaking I found my imagination actually engaged, although I found myself imaging Buscema doing projects he never did, and now never will: a Flash Gordon comic book, an adaptation of Treasure Island (all those greedy calculating faces), a stab at a Kubert-style Hawkman. Although he probably wouldn't have wanted to—he said in an interview that "I've had enough comics to last me the rest of my life," and, even less romantically, that comics were "a job that [kept] me out of debt, and that's the only thing I look on it as." But that doesn't matter to me, really. John Buscema was so good that even if his heart wasn't really in it, I can look back at his books and see that mine still is.