[Peter B. Gillis]

I wonder if Richard Hughes was feeding John Buscema specifically the stories with action in them. "You'll like this one, John: Knights fighting dragons!"

Link to the book: Forbidden Worlds 081

[Robb_K]

Editors have certainly been known to do such things.  Daniel Branca (1959-60 Carl Barks-style Donald Duck artist) was certainly handed all the most dynamic scripts with the most drastic action, over 1953-54 other prolific Barks-style D.D. artist, Victor Arriagada Rios (Vicar) by Danish Disney Comics editors from the late 1970s through the beginning of the early 2000s.


I would bet many, if not most GA comics editors would give their best artists for a particular effect in a particular genre, so their comics lines can be shown in their best light, featuring excellent quality in the types of stories and artwork that is what the majority of their customers seeks most.

[crashryan]

I've wondered about Buscema's work at ACG. There wasn't that much of it. He certainly wasn't a regular like Whitney, Rosenberger, Forte, and the others who were in almost every issue. I keep thinking of something John Buscema said when Jim Vadeboncoeur and I interviewed him at the San Diego ComicCon, a thousand years ago. As you know JB had a good run over at Dell, then suddenly disappeared. I was dumbfounded when Buscema, a famously reliable workhorse, said that he blew his Dell gig because in those days he was an unreliable goof-off. The way he told it JB had already messed up deadlines but the editor had cut him a lot of slack because he liked Buscema's work. Then he was given an over-the-weekend rush job that absolutely had to be ready on Monday. Buscema frittered around instead, spending most of the weekend finishing a chess board he was making. When he came in on Monday with an unfinished job the editor fired him on the spot.

I wonder if the fact that JB did only a handful of stories for Richard Hughes might have been either because Buscema didn't always deliver on time or because Hughes had heard the story and didn't trust him. It's obvious that somewhere along the way JB learned his lesson. If anything he swung all the way to the other extreme. For a while at Marvel he was everywhere, not only doing regular books but filling in for artists who hadn't yet learned their own lessons.