Happy Birthday Stan Lee!

Happy 85th Birthday today to “The Man” himself… Stan Lee! What is there to say about Stan that hasn’t already been said? He’s the architect of the Marvel Universe. Sure he had some help along the way from legends like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, but at the end of the day it was Stan’s enthusiasm that hooked people on Marvel Comics.

As a reader, he made you feel as if you were part of a secret Marvel club. From the nicknames in the credits (Jack “King” Kirby, “Jazzy” John Romita, “Happy” Herb Trimpe) to the amazing “Bullpen Bulletins”, reading a Marvel Comic in those days was a blast. I’d often flip to the Bulletins and Letter’s pages before I’d read the actual comic.

So go on out and read a good ol’ Stan Lee comic. Hell, Stevie Wonder could throw a cat in a comic shop and hit a dozen books that either written by Stan or created by Stan.

Thanks, Stan… here’s to 85 more.

--Gent

Goings On

Boy, life sure gets in the way of this little mindless comic blog. In the past few weeks, on top of moving I switched jobs and starting freelance lettering again. So while things got crazy for a bit they’re settling in again.

As you can tell by the previous post I’m letting for DC Comics and I’m loving it. The change of characters and just general atmosphere really reinvigorated lettering for me. As I said earlier, I didn’t expect to get all jazzed about working on Batman but it was really one of the coolest gigs I’ve ever had. Since then I’ve worked on Detective Comics and Gotham Underground as well. This weekend I lettered Booster Gold. A book I know nothing about but it just the act of working on something new makes a huge difference.

In other news I picked up Ultimates Volume 3 #1 last week. New Joe Mad art. Can’t lose, right? Wrong. Mad is better than ever but the coloring just ruined the book for me. It was so bad I was startled by it’s awfulness. So bad I couldn’t believe they let the book go to the printer looking like a dark, muddy and completely overpowering mess. As a letterer you accept taking a backseat to the rest of the team. People don’t buy books for lettering and they don’t buy books for coloring either. People are buying that book for Joe Mad… not for the coloring. I’m hoping they’ll release a penciled version of the book, but we’ll see. Maybe next issue will be toned down a bit.

If you haven’t read all of Randall Issue One, you can read it in it entirety here… go check it out if you missed it over at Pixelstrips.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned… more NYComix are in the works as well as new Randall.

--Randy