Last week, San Francisco’s Cartoon Art Museum hosted a reception for an exhibit of artwork by legendary comic book penciller Gene Colan, best known for his lengthy runs on such 1960s and ’70s Marvel Comics titles as Daredevil and Tomb of Dracula. (The latter series arguably defined horror comics for its era; it also introduced the vampire hunter Blade, around whom Wesley Snipes would build a successful film franchise.) Yet the 82-year-old artist’s career extends back to the 1950s, when he began drawing war comics for Marvel’s corporate predecessors, and in the early half of the 1980s he went over to DC and became the primary artist on both Batman and Detective Comics, giving the Dark Knight’s adventures a distinctive visual style.
The exhibition was curated by novelist and comics fan Glen David Gold, who sent us some pictures from the event. “The best part of the evening was [Colan’s wife] Adrienne telling the story of talking him out of an advertising job in 1961 or so, and into comics,” Gold emailed us. “She believed in him and his dreams. It’s one of those things that sounds pedestrian, but you look at it from 50 years later, and it’s one spouse believing in the other. It’s about marriage and faith and all those good things.”
“The art itself is really interesting,” Gold added. “Gene is idiosyncratic, to say the least, but it’s only gotten better. In fact, I think his 1990s and 2000s pencil work is better than his 1970s work.” All the more remarkable, considering that glaucoma has left the artist completely blind in one eye, and nearly blind in the other. Artist Charles Yoakum was in the audience at the reception, and as he observed, “There are entire schools of Kirby or Steranko or Adams, and yet, there is no school of Colan. There is simply no one with the touch and ability that Gene has with a pencil, nor his idiosyncratic layouts and storytelling approach.”