Correct me if I'm wrong, but The Kree first turn up in FF #64 and #65, which introduced Ronan the Accuser. This storyline tied the Kree to the origin of the Inhumans.
No, that's right. The Captain Marvel storyline in Marvel Super-Heroes #12-13 picks up the plot threads of that directly, with Mar-Vell trying to recover Kree Sentry 459. I can't recall, without looking at FF 64-65, whether any Kree soldiers appeared in those issues, or whether it was just Sentry 459 and Ronan.
I'm almost certain you can blame Stan Goldberg for the choice of white & green as Mar-Vell's color scheme. Unless he was given some specific directive by Stan Lee, Goldberg was responsible for all the coloring choices, as head of the color department. He colored all the covers and most of the interiors, as well. He was a salaried employee, and only drew
Millie the Model as a freelancer to make extra dough. Both Sol Brodsky and John Verpoorten were certainly capable of doing some coloring if there were a deadline crunch, and I'm not sure if Marie Severin was helping out with coloring yet in 1967. In all likelihood, it seems like Stan G. was capable of handling the entire line of titles up to that point by himself. In 1968, Marvel was sold to Cadence Industries, and got a new distributor, freeing themselves from the cap on the number of titles they could publish while they had been distributed by DC, and started expanding rapidly. Archie Comics was expanding too, with
The Archie Show on TV, and Stan G. started freelancing for them, while still drawing
Millie (converted back to its original humor format), and later
Chili, for Marvel. DC got back into teen humor titles also, and Stan G. was freelancing for them too, all the while continuing to work his day job in Marvel's coloring department. Busy guy! Anyway, the cover of
Marvel Super-Heroes #12 would have been colored first (by Stan), and that's when the choice would have been made. It does seem at least likely that Kree soldiers might have appeared in FF 65, but as their roles would have been just those of "extras", it's hard for me to say for sure without actually referring to the story for confirmation.
I can't remember if I mentioned this somewhere before, but Alex Toth spent some months downunder working with an animated unit (sorry, don't recall the name of the outfit) that H-B subcontracted some work to in the 1970s when they got super-busy... To the best of my recollection, what they were producing was a series of one-hour adaptations of classic literary stories for TV syndication. Toth was sent to oversee the set-up, doing his usual design work and making sure the animators stayed 'on-model', along with (I think) a small group of H-B personnel, a director and a couple of key animators. Of course, Alex Toth had nothing at all to do with SGC2C -- that was produced specifically for Cartoon Network (and is considered their first actual originally-produced series) by Mike Lazzo, after Ted Turner had acquired both the cable network and H-B. Comic writer/artist Evan Dorkin and his partner Sarah Dyer wrote a lot of the scripts for the series, though, and naturally the original character designs used were Toth's model sheets. Short clips of Space Ghost, Zorak, Brak and Moltar from the original series were recycled over new backgrounds, peppered throughout to keep animation costs down, but much of the animation needed to be done from scratch. As per the usual limited-animation methods, those sequences were also regularly recycled to limit spending whenever possible. Obviously the scripts and voice actors were what was carrying the show, not the animation. It was successful enough to run 11 seasons and inspire two spin-offs,
Cartoon Planet and
The Brak Show.Steve Rude is probably the most under-rated (or at least under-appreciated, based on sales in the current marketplace) living artist working in comics. I'd love to see him draw a Space Ghost / Nexus crossover, but alas... it's only a pipe dream. Space Ghost / Batman '66? That would seem more feasible, but again, it seems merchandising of Batman '66 peaked with
Archie Meets Batman '66 (which I knew about 2 years before it happened, having heard about it directly from artist Dan Parent), which may have been the final Batman '66 comic project. Doesn't seem to be anything more on the horizon for DC's revival of the H-B Super-Adventure heroes (Rude worked on a couple of those stories), either. This week's DC comics had a big back cover ad for Warner Home Video's BR release of
Jonny Quest. Where's the comic to tie-in, DC?
Author
Topic: LOEG - original Seven Stars appearances (Read 1854 times)
