Sal Buscema drew one of, if not the first, Avengers comic I ever read; but it took me a while to warm up to him when he took over art on Thor after Walt Simonson. Still, he does a pretty good job with a tough one today: Daredevil's armor! From 1994, Spectacular Spider-Man #219, "Two of a Kind" Plot by Tom DeFalco, script by Todd DeZago, pencils by Sal Buscema, inks by Scott Hanna.
Daredevil was supposedly a new guy at this point, not Matt Murdock; yet he calls Spidey Peter more than once, and later Spidey shows DD his home and his face. Admittedly, Spidey has bigger things on his mind, since he's been poisoned by the Owl and the Vulture! Even though the Owl was trying to pull a Daredevil and erase his old identity, he still seems halfway reasonable compared to the inexplicably much younger Vulture. Vulture poisons one of Owl's old business rivals, just to show him "the folly in doing battle with your own dark nature." Owl lets the rival die, but later during the obligatory fight, acknowledges Spidey as a worthy opponent, and gives him the antidote...which turns out to be fake, leaving Spidey still poisoned and facing certain death!
While things aren't looking good for Peter, Mary Jane has a better time of this one, reuniting with her long-estranged father. It's melodramatic as all get out, but Buscema's art does a lot of the heavy lifting. I hate the cursive font, though.
Same here on the cursive font aspect. The fact that it's cursive is frustrating enough, but add in the fact that it's usually small AF to read,
ReplyDeleteand you wonder why they even use it in the first place.
Man, I really had to warm up to Sal's art when I first discovered him. I still prefer his brother John, but Sal's stuff was/is still pretty damn solid as far as storytelling goes, even if his faces at time, can look, well, ugly. He had a hell of a run on Spectacular though, except towards the end, when Klaus Janson buried his work in those unnecessary heavy inks. Just really killed it in a bad way for me.