Dog Star Omnibus: Avengers

DON HECK

THE MARVEL YEARS

The first I ever heard of Don Heck was in the infamous interview Harlan Ellison gave Gary Groth's Comics Journal back in the 80s. The interview led to a famous lawsuit (and another lawsuit - this one between Ellison and Groth - after that), but the Heck part came when Ellison was describing the difference between who he considered "real" comic book artists and the 9-to-5-ers. Groth goaded Ellison into disparaging Don Heck by supplying his name, and Harlan went with it, all the while thinking he was talking about Sal Buscema. Harlan - the story goes anyway - apologized to Don every time he saw him in the years after the interview, and Don shrugged it off. (His response was pretty subtle.)

I wasn't reading Comics Journal back then, nor any time after, but the controversy was well-remarked upon elsewhere, and the name Don Heck stuck with me. I didn't learn about any of this other stuff - the lawsuit, certainly, but Ellison's case of mistaken identity and subsequent redaction - until much later. When I began going through the early Marvels, though, and coming across Don's work, I kept thinking "This guy looks pretty good; what am I missing?"

From 1980 to 1990 I read virtually nothing but Marvel. Don Heck was working mostly at DC during this time, although he came back to Marvel just as I was getting more into DC. Our paths never crossed on any book I was reading. Once trades and reprints and digital copies allowed me to start looking at older stuff once too costly to acquire, I discovered his work for the first time.

He worked for Comics Media before moving over to Atlas/ Marvel, where he stayed until leaving for DC in the 70s.

I saw all of this kind of stuff (westerns, romance, fantasy-horror - I didn't dive into Strange Tales for lack of time; there's an awful lot of work he did on that title during this period) before I saw panel one of the superhero work for which he's primarily known. And to which we will turn exclusively after two quick points. Point the first:

I picked up John Coates's Don Heck: A Work of Art last month when TwoMorrows put it on sale for the crazy but much appreciated price of $10. Design and illustrations-wise, it's a beautiful book. For that alone, it's worth picking up at the non-sale price. It's an appreciated book, being the sole such study of Heck's long career in comics, but its reproduction in full of two repetitive interviews, the kind that reproduce "[coughs]" and "[laughs]"in quoted text to an absurdly literal degree, made reading it kind of a slog. Still, there's a ton of info in there (even if it's repeated too often.) One thing I walked away with is that Don was a damn good inker. He may have been third fiddle after Kirby and Ditko in that lightning-in-a-bottle bullpen of 60s Marvel, but Kirby and especially Ditko looked great when Don inked them. I didn't focus on anything only inked by Don, below, but interested parties should look no further than Coates's book - or the original comics themselves, of course - to see what I mean.

And (2) Don's extensive work as a cover artist should be appreciated, particularly in his pre-Marvel days. See these galleries for Horrific, Danger, Weird Terror, and Death Valley for more.

Okay on with the show. Don had the good/bad fortune to follow Kirby on most titles, but one character for whom he was in on the ground floor was ol' Shellhead himself:

Tales of Suspense 39.

Not my favorite era of Iron Man, to be honest. Ditto for another early Marvel icon Don worked on:

Journey Into Mystery 98 (above) and Avengers 146 (below).

Heck's (arguably) most well-known work for Marvel came in the pages of The Avengers. People think of the early days of Marvel and they think Stan Lee/ Jack Kirby, but they were really only paired consistently on Fantastic Four. Heck took over the Avengers on issue 9 and stayed through issue 45 (before returning to the title in the 70s, as well as Avengers Spotlight - another title I was reading at the time it came out but then stopped just prior to Heck working on the title; another missed connection - in the 80s.)

I didn't grab too, too many screencaps, as my digital copies are those God-awful re-colored ones instead of the originals. But I still grabbed plenty.

Two pin ups from Avengers Annual 1.

Annual 2 (l) and Avengers 301 (r).

Avengers 112.

Avengers 11.

Heck's long tenure at The Avengers - plus his designs for so many Marvel tie-in products like the Slurpee cups or calendars or Super Stamps - made him something of an ambassador for the characters. Do the kids seeing the Avengers movies today know how instrumental he was to their favorite characters? Maybe, maybe not. I don't say this to dis the "kids today," I just mean, he's an unsung presence of the Avengers-verse.

Roy Thomas once quipped that Don was the only illustrator in the early days of Marvel who knew how to draw women. I don't quite agree, but there's no doubt that Don's extensive background in romance and other comics insured the Scarlet Witch and The Wasp looked like supermodels.

From Avengers 12 and Annual 2. While we're here, I find the Wasp's 60s outfits to be Emma-Peel-level iconic for the era.

Tales To Astonish 48 and 49.

As for the Scarlet Witch, the presentation is often not very subtle.

Avengers 45.

Avengers 111.

Annual 2.

Even in her civilian duds. (From Avengers 157.) Great street scene detail, here.

Things got a little carried away in this department in his work on the original X-Men.

X-Men 39.

X-Men 40. Kind of a Tina Louise thing going on here. And here:

X-Men 54.

In X-Men 148, she either goes undercover as a model, or gets a side job as a model, I an't recall which.

And this panel is a good segue to a little section I call:

"Eyebrow Boobs"

I usually say something like "hey, don't shoot the messenger" during parts like this. I started noticing something about the conspicuous way Don drew breasts - there was this under-cup shading that, in many places, looks like eyebrows.

X-Men 54

JLA 199. (Oops, I guess I left one DC in here.)

Avengers Annual 1 and 2.

There are many variations - some of his female characters have big, bushy eyebrow-boobs, others have pencil-thin ones. Was it a cartooning technique? Unintentional? There's no doubt Don drew beautiful women - this isn't a dis or anything. Nor is it an attempt to discuss the representation of the female body in cartooning and the male gaze and other uber-agony-of-the-mind topics.

And this is just filthy, Johnny Blaze, from Ghost Rider 23:

You pig. (Oh wait, Coot is somebody off-panel's name?)

I'll be back next time with a more substantial cross-section of Don's DC work. Although he was in on the ground floor and I often nominate him as one of the Mt. Rushmore faces of the early days of Marvel, it was at DC where Don is generally regarded to have done his best work. Until then, here are some leftovers to round out this woefully incomplete overview of Don's Marvel work.