The Invincible Gene Colan

by Clifford Lawrence Meth (Editor), Neil Gaiman (Contribution by), Walter Simonson (Contribution by)

It is a stunning visual tribute and biography of one of the most brilliant, sublime and influential comic artists in the genre's history. Including observations from Stan Lee, Neil Gaiman, Walter Simonson, Marv Wolfman, Tom Palmer and John Romita Sr., it also contains tons of Gene's beautiful, eye-popping art.

Genres: Art

131 pages, Paperback

First published February 28, 2010

Reviews

[Andy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gene Colan certainly deserves a better treatment than he gets here. Dr. Michael J. Vassallo gives a good overview of Colan's career, followed by summaries of Colan's work on Sub-Mariner, Daredevil, Dr. Strange, Iron Man, Captain America, The Tomb of Dracula, Howard the Duck, and other miscellaneous Marvel titles. These sections include a variety of art samples: reproductions of original artwork, commissioned art, sketches, sample pages from comics and comics covers. There's some wonderful stuff here, but far too many of the covers are small, smaller than a typical playing card. These covers certainly deserve a larger and better treatment. In fact, a coffee table-sized book as we've seen representing other artists (Ditko, Kirby, Kubert, etc.) would certainly be in order.

Much of the book's text consists of tributes from artists such as Walt Simonson, Tom Palmer, Mike Esposito, and writers such as Neil Gaiman. However the place we learn the most about Colan is near the end of the book in a 1995 interview with editor Clifford Meth. The tributes are nice, but we really (and briefly) get to know who Colan really was in this interview. It makes you want more, but unfortunately it's just not there.

Something that is there is a frequency of printing errors. Many pages contain margin captions that have been printed over each other, rendering them unreadable.

Colan was such a unique artist and a great influence on others that he deserves a better, larger book. Let's hope we get that book someday.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice look at Gene's career. It's too bad there were so many printing errors...

[j_ay · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nice tribute, but all too short.