On how I'm starting to get into George Tuska...

Did you ever have a comic book artist whose work it took you a while to get into?  George Tuska is that guy for me.  I've probably seen hundreds of comics with his artwork in them, but never really put much thought into them.  For me, George Tuska was the guy who did that Marvel Planet of the Apes adaptation where Taylor looks more like Steve Reeves, the actor from those Italian Hercules movies, than Charlton Heston.  And the apes look as though they leaped out of a humor mag.  I don't think he was the ideal choice for the material.  The typical, dynamic Marvel approach, which Tuska excelled at, is more appropriate to broadly-acted superheroics than rather downbeat sci-fi adventure flicks.

Of course, now I understand Marvel couldn't get the likeness rights to use Heston.  Licensing was different back then.  Nowadays you see Luke Skywalker, and he's drawn to look exactly like Mark Hamill.  Back then, the best artists were allowed to do was to give the characters similar hair color.  And sometimes, as with the Apes comic, not even that much.  I've also come to love those funny Tuska ape faces.  As advanced for their time as they were, the make-up appliances in the movie have a certain rigidity.  Actors like Roddy McDowall and Kim Hunter learned to twitch and contort their faces underneath to keep the make-up in some kind of motion and prevent the characters' faces from freezing into masks, but there's no disguising the simple up-and-down movement of the mouths and lack of lip animation.  Tuska was able to take some artistic license with them and give the apes all kinds of gaping expressions.  None of it is particularly subtle, but it doesn't really have to be.  Alfredo Alcala will always be my Planet of the Apes artist of choice, because his ornate work fits the material and matches its melancholy mood.  Mike Ploog and Tom Sutton battle it out for second place, but I appreciate Tuska's powerful figure work and over-the-top facial acting.

This morning I read an online exchange between a pro-Tuska writer and a strongly anti-Tuska fan on why Tuska is underappreciated.  I've seen more and more of this kind of stuff lately, and the more I'm exposed to Tuska and his work, the more it appeals to me.  It's not so much the opinions of others that sway me.  It's looking at pages and not being able to deny Tuska produced solid work.  It may not be as spectacular as this artist or another-- name any of the greats-- but it's more than just serviceable.  And when teamed with a sympathetic inker, Tuska could really shine.  The underpinnings are there-- the exaggerated, heroic anatomy, the dynamic poses, the clear and easy-to-read storytelling.  A few loose pages I've seen with his pencils and decent ink jobs really look fun and lively.

I've only scratched the surface of George Tuska, but exposure has convinced me to invest some time in Tuska appreciation.  Now I just need to read more stories with his art!

Space diplomacy, 1970s Marvel-style!

Look! It's Colonel George Taylor of ANSA, our first ambassador to the stars...

George Tuska, Mike Esposito, Adventures on the Planet of
the Apes #1 (October 1975)

That's going to do wonders for interstellar relations.

Gnarrk: Smartest of the Teen Titans

We've pretty much established the original Teen Titans are no brain trust. No think tank. Even by the standards of typical teenage behavior, the Titans are a pretty dim-witted bunch. With the addition of Gnarrk, a Cro-Magnon ("Early Modern Human" or "Anatomically Modern Human" in today's terminology) teen from 20,000 years ago, their collective intelligence quotient took a mega-leap upward. Unfortunately, as we see in this page from Teen Titans # 39 (1972), the other male members of the Titans find Gnarrk's vocabulary troubling.  From his pose and facial expression, Robin takes it particularly hard.  See, growing up in a circus family and then becoming the ward and partner of Batman left him with little time for things like education and self-esteem, or developing and expressing ideas that aren't simple re-wordings of things he's just heard.

What Gnarrk should have said in the second panel is, "Donna's hip to my scene, Lilith, baby.  I wasn't making like some crazy Sir Lancelot on a Camelot trip.  My bag is taking it easy with the muscle stuff and using my noggin, dig?"

The Rising of the Planet of Apes That Rose

Ah, the teaser trailer. It looks like it's condensing the entire backstory of how the Planet of the Apes... er... planet came to be into a single James Franco-heavy film. In the original series, some kind of plague kills off the dogs and cats and over the next few years, people turn to chimpanzees, orangutans and gorillas for animal companionship. Which is an incredibly stupid idea, given what we now know about chimps. They make lousy pets, unless you think having your eyeballs gouged out and your genitals ripped off is fun stuff. And yet pets they become. A generation or two later, the apes are smarter yet enslaved by a bunch of fascists living in Los Angeles's Century City development. Then talking chimp Caesar shows up and leads the apes in a great rebellion, which sparks a nuclear war. In the new movie, it looks as though the planet rises in a matter of weeks.

Cool stuff, though, and I doubt many in the audience will care about this movie's continuity disconnect with an old film series that frequently couldn't keep its own story straight. Plus, it already looks to be a massive improvement over the bone-headed version told in Tim Burton's dopey "re-imagining."

But it's so gloomy. You know why bad things happen at companies like James Franco's Famous Farmaceuticals (NYSE: FFF)? Because they're all glass and steel and blue-tinted mood lighting. If they'd brightened things up with some warm colors, maybe Franco would've smiled a bit more and none of these genius apes would've gone on murderous rampages-- which I'm assuming they do based on some of the creepy images here. Unless they stalk people and leap at helicopters only to present them with Edible Arrangements gift bouquets.

Lesson learned: If you make your workplace look like a haunted house, evil will befall it.