The Case of Dave vs. Dave!

(PG; Memoir) "Youth is wasted on the young" update of a sketch I did in high school of Captain America beating up comic book artists I thought were lame.

The new retro cover

About this cover

I've been wanting to update the high school drawing for years, but only found the time recently. Landed on the idea of 60-something me punching teenage me while the insulted elders watch from beyond the grave. Internet photo reference for Infantino and Robbins was easy, while finding good photos of Heck and Perlin was a lot more challenging.

The final art was just going to be a 9 x 12 inch sketch, but the idea of making it a faux cover became very intriguing. Having grown tired of my retro Marvel covers, I recently became fascinated with the DC covers of the Ira Schnapp era. His design and calligraphy were more sophisticated than Marvel's. I even like the go-go checks.

For cover design style, I settled on the Justice League of America 1966-1968 period when the logo was in block letters with no stars or control shape. I used Comicraft's Drop Case font as a guide to draw the logo by hand in Adobe Illustrator.

Next came mimicking Schnapp's style on the blurbs and headers. Fighting my inner Artie Simek was necessary to draw that one clamshell word balloon.

The final piece is a little overblown and clumsy next to an actual DC cover, but far exceeds the low bar I set in high school.

My high school drawing

About this so-called art

I drew "Captain America--Lame Artist Smasher!" in 1979, as a high school senior in Springfield, Massachusetts. That headline could easily be interpreted as Cap being lame at artist-smashing, but that wasn't my intent. My teenage confidence enabling me insult creators outside my personal taste solely came from reading How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way and Origins of Marvel Comics. The only artists my gatekeeping friends and I respected were old school (John Buscema, John Romita, Gene Colan, Ross Andru), artsy (Neal Adams, Barry Windsor-Smith), or modern (John Byrne, George Perez). Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby, and Wally Wood were corny to us as the time. None of us even heard of Alex Toth.

Carmine Infantino, Don Heck, Frank Robbins, and Don Perlin did groundbreaking comics in previous decades, but struggled to find work by the late-'70s. Marvel's editor-in-chief Jim Shooter hired them and other Golden Age legends for second- and third-tier books. Crapping on Shooter's old-school kindness seemed like divine duty.

My skinny Captain America is based on how John Buscema drew him in The Avengers #58, 1968 (reprinted in the 1976 Marvel Treasury Edition Giant Superhero Holiday Grab-Bag). Photo reference for Carmine Infantino is from the 1975 Marvel/DC crossover event Superman vs. Spider-Man. I somehow knew Frank Robbins had thick framed glasses, but didn't bother looking for Perlin or Heck.

Project notes

I drew this as a one-off joke in high school for my friend Brian Kirk. Probably forgot about it right after adding the signature. Fast forward to 2005 when I reconnected with Brian through Facebook. You'll have to ask him why he kept it. This echo from the past was a shocking embarrassment at first, but that's who I was. Adapting it as a faux cover is meant to show everything I've learned since.

Dave M!