Old-school Official Handbook to the Marvel Universe

[proteus_lives]

Greetings True Believers!

I love old-school OHMUs. I picked up a handful at Wizard-Con. I really like the art and the way they really went all-out with the bios and power descriptions.

I picked out few examples of my favorite art from the stack I bought. WARNING! 80s fashion and hair-cuts ahoy!




Wave back at Devil Dinosaur!



Pre-movie Blade.



Boom-Boom's Madonna phase.



Bullseye with great crazy-eyes.



Contessa Valentina Allegra de la Fontaine (Fury's main-squeeze) look was later stolen by Rogue.



Meggan is just too adorable.



Moon Boy! Devil Dinosaur's BFF.



Persuasion, the Purple Man's daughter.



Look at Jubilee's scary Joker-grin.



Killraven's Playgirl pose.



Madame Hydra, Dr. Freud on line one for you.



I loved Psylocke's old-school look.



Razorback! A mutant trucker from Arkansas.



I almost forgot! Apparently Whoopi Goldberg was in Power Pack as Numinus.


Love these books.

Comments

[perletwo]

IIRC, Joe Rubenstein inked pretty much all of the first iteration of HotMU, so I'd call it a good bet. And he's not an inker with a chameleon style, so everything comes out with that Rubensteinian heavy finish.

[jlroberson]

Which pretty much always gave a very nice burnished look to even the least of pencillers. Palmer, I'd say, would be another one. I won't go so far as to say both inkers overwhelmed their pencillers, but their styles had a way of filling in gaps and how many of those gaps were filled depended on the penciller. Palmer, for instance. With Colan or Williamson it was usually a fairly glorious blend(and Colan and Leiloha were the smartest inkers Colan ever had, who knew just what to strengthen and solidify, and what to add and what not to*). With anyone lesser, you could tell that Palmer was brought in to save the art, and basically used the pencils as elaborate layouts.

*And my hat's off to ANYONE who was able to coherently ink Colan. I grew up with his work--ToD and HTD were my two favorite comics when I was ages 6-11, the duration of their runs--and worship it as everyone ought to. But I can also see why he went mostly to printing his pencils directly in the 80s, because most inkers just couldn't cope with those wild and amorphous pencils. If you look at them, they're a churning, painterly WHOOSH swirling in all directions on the page. I expect they make a lot more sense when you can see the shading and gradations(as opposed to high-contrast xeroxes, say) of his work, something that most inkers wouldn't have been able to deal with and wouldn't have been needed for.

[perletwo]

Oh my YES on Colan. Remember that little suspense/horror series he did for DC in the 80s, Night Force? I went from getting into comics via George Perez's nice clean New Teen Titans straight to reading that, and my little kid mind went "BUZUHHHHHH?!?" I knew it was impressive once I deciphered what I was looking at, but admiring both style extremes just did. not. compute.

[icon_uk]

So much motto to that, I was growing up at the same time, and after so much exposure to the ligne claire 9sp) approach, Coaln was like a slap in the face, it took a little longer to see the artistry of his work, but it was so worth the effort!

[nezchan]

I was kinda the same way with Bill Sienkiewicz's stuff back in the late 80's. I can look at it now and see what an amazing thing it was, but at the time I just couldn't comprehend what was in front of me.