Fantastic Four #302 original art by John & Sal Buscema (plus color guides!)

I recently had some comic money come in, and what do I do with it?  Spend it on comic-related merchandise.  I'm a hopeless consumer.  Perhaps such consumerism can be forgiven, though, when I'm spending some cash on original Fantastic Four art - and not just any, but a page from the great John Buscema...inked by his younger brother, Sal!  After Jack Kirby left the book, John Buscema took over and put his own stamp on the characters.  John is probably, in fact, the most classic FF artist after Kirby, so I'm of course ecstatic to add some of his original work to my collection.

This art is some of Buscema's later FF work, this page coming from Fantastic Four #302, which had a cover date of May, 1987.  The cover to that issue features the Human Torch and no other FF member, but the page I got features every member BUT the Torch.  (For those who might be curious about the cover, if I remember correctly, Johnny managed to flame on again by trying REALLY hard.)

The Thing only appears in one panel on this page, and he's reading a book titled "How to Pick Up Girls".  The book is circled in blue pencil with a note about the title written in the margins.  I'd have to dig out this issue to be sure, but I'm assuming that they changed the title for publication.

Mr. Fantastic and Franklin Richards are the most prominently featured characters on the page...Franklin going through his "Tattletale" stage with the Power Pack around this time.  Franklin is a tough character to write, as he's often too powerful and thus no one can figure out what to do with him.  But it's nice when the creators try to work him in somehow.

The back of the page holds two markings, the first of which reads "hold for John Leight".  A quick Google search doesn't bring up any information on Mr. Leight, so I can't confirm that he had anything to do with Marvel or the book.  It might be the name of the original owner of the page.  It might be the name of someone in production.  Perhaps we'll never know.

Also written on back are the names of the two contributing artists - John and Sal Buscema.  If I'm not mistaken, it looks like the Buscema handwriting, so perhaps this is as close as I'll get to an autograph from John, who passed away several years ago.

I recently purchased an art book to hold all of my original art.  This page, by virtue of being the oldest and most valuable (and perhaps coolest) page in the collection, obviously gets page one.

And not to relegate this to a footnote, because it's very cool in its own right, but since we're talking about original art, here's some new production art that I purchased a little while ago.  These two pages are color guides from Fantastic Four #194.  Color guides are reproductions of the original line work that are sent to the colorist, in this case George Roussos.  He uses them as a preliminary guide to figure out what colors to use on the real thing...that's why they have markings and writing all over 'em.

I think they're a swell look into how comics were made before the proliferation of computers.  And this one has some great shots of the Thing and Alicia.

The Thing #31 original art by Ron Wilson!

For someone who is a pretty big fan of the Thing, it's taken me quite a while to get some original art from one of the character's solo titles.  Much of that is because both Marvel Two-in-One and the first Thing volume are between 25 and 35 years old, and the second volume ran a meager eight issues (seriously, what a revoltin' development THAT was).  Add this to the fact that some of those who contributed large swaths of material to the earlier series were named Byrne, Buscema, Perez and Kirby, and there aren't many pages floating around out there that I can afford.

I have been keeping an eye on one newcomer, though, for quite a while, and a few weeks ago the price dropped to a number that I was able to commit to, so I'm happy to say that I'm now the owner of an original page of artwork from the first solo Thing series, namely, issue #31, page 9, with art by Ron Wilson and Kim DeMulder, and letters by Jack Morelli.

As I've lamented before, the Thing (in both Two-in-One and his original series) has had some truly awful stories told about him.  There have been plenty of highlights as well, to be sure, but also a lot of fluff and other stories best left forgotten.  The final dozen or so issues of the Thing volume one fits into that category, as he returns from a strange trip to the Secret Wars planet only to wander around aimlessly for a time, joining a professional wrestling team and feeling depressed.  Also he wore boots, which I hated.

Issue #31 featured one of those aimless stories, where Ben hangs out with Sharon Ventura (later the She-Thing) as she tries to be an actress in a Hollywood production of a movie featuring the Devil Dinosaur.  Ben keeps mistaking movie props and situations for the real thing, and as a result he halts production several times due to his ill-timed heroics (at one point, he punches an animatronic Devil Dinosaur and everyone gives him heck for it).

This is, of course, not to say that I'm anything less than thrilled to own a page of Thing history.  This particular page has seen some wear, as its corners are clipped (which is the case with a lot of pages from this time) and there are a number of editorial notes written in the margins.  These notes and other corrections add a lot to the page, and it took me a minute to realize that most of them are simply corrections in the dialogue.  For instance, I thought that the following panel:

might be the result of a spat between the artist and the editor, before I realized that it was simply a note for the letterer, probably in an attempt to get Ben off the hook for his mishap with the Devil Dinosaur robot.  There are several of these corrections, and plenty of White Out, on the page.

Two of the panels were swapped out after the fact, and in 1985/86 that meant cutting the board, swapping the panels and taping it all back together.

The page came with a copy of the issue the art appeared in, which was a nice gesture.  I'll definitely bring the book with me if I ever happen to see Ron Wilson at a convention again.  He's a classic Thing artist, having worked on more issues of both Two-in-One and the Thing than any other artist, and even though this issue was toward the end of the book and chronicled a rather inauspicious period in the character's history, it's still pretty nifty.  I may never own one of the more high end pieces (check out this guy's collection! Yow!), but I'm more than pleased to finally have in my possession some original Thing art.