Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Black and White Wednesday: "Comes the End Time" by Richardson and Alcala

Hey, hey, hey, Groove-ophiles! The last great mag turned out by Warren during the Groovy Age was The Rook. What made it great for Teen Groove, though, was not the lead/title feature (though I truly dug it), but the inclusion Alfredo Alcala's classic hero Voltar as a back-up strip. Now, at the time, I'd read about Voltar in Maurice Horn's The World Encyclopedia of Comics and I'd seen Alcala's work in places like DC's mystery mags and Marvel's various Conan comics, so I knew what to expect. Or so I thought. When I flipped to "Comes the End Time" (scripted by Will Richardson aka Bill Dubay) in The Rook #2 (cover-dated February 1980), I was blown away. I knew about Alcala's lush inks, his feathery line that made his characters look more like three-dimensional statues than drawings. But the full- and double-page spreads, the amount of eye-boggling detail--I wasn't ready for that. Are you?

2 comments:

  1. These scans really show off Alcala's talent! Not only are they light years beyond the composition and rendering from his Weird War Tales stories, they also make his inks appear much more crip than the poor paper quality and printing quality that made some od his Swamp Thing work seem a little muddy. Another B&W Wednesday slam dunk!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Actually, Alfredo Alcala originally drew VOLTAR in 1963, so this barbarian hero predates Frazetta's interpretation of Conan by several years (and looks remarkably similar).

    Chris A.

    ReplyDelete

LinkWithin

Blog Widget by LinkWithin
Special thanks to Mike's Amazing World of Comics and Grand Comics Database for being such fantastic resources for covers, dates, creator info, etc. Thou art treasures true!


Note to "The Man": All images are presumed copyright by the respective copyright holders and are presented here as fair use under applicable laws, man! If you hold the copyright to a work I've posted and would like me to remove it, just drop me an e-mail and it's gone, baby, gone.


All other commentary and insanity copyright GroovyAge, Ltd.

As for the rest of ya, the purpose of this blog is to (re)introduce you to the great comics of the 1970s. If you like what you see, do what I do--go to a comics shop, bookstore, e-Bay or whatever and BUY YOUR OWN!