Nice to see that Randy Bowen values John's opinions when it comes to his statues! Read the post by Bowen Designs Painter, Danno...

http://www.statuemarvels.com/f87/bowen-designs-kitty-pryde-s tatue-up-order-you-buying-8260.html

Some new photos of the upcoming Sci-Fi Revoltech action figures of Batman from THE DARK KNIGHT and Giant Robo from the live action TV version (Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot):

http://ngeekhiong.blogspot.com/2010/04/sci-fi-revoltech-batm an-giant-robo.html

Robo looks great, but not sure what to make of that Batman figure...

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It was gratifying to have Randy ask about Kitty's boots. He's asked about other things, from time to time, over the years. I suspect he's also talking to other people who are "in the know". That would be at least one reason his figures are so good -- his painters seem to grasp the very comicbooky notion of "colors not found in nature". Only rarely have I had to repaint a Bowen figure to make it look how it looks in my head. (The black and white costume Neal Adams gave Angel, for instance, has turned blue over the years, and I felt a "restoration" was necessary. Ditto Black Bolt.)

A lot of the changes that happened in costumes over the early years of Marvel seemed to spring at least to some extent from how Jack Kirby worked. As I have noted many times, he was, at the beginning of the "Marvel Age", producing what we would today call breakdowns, not full pencils, and as such he was very much dependent on the inkers to finish the work. Some inkers knew what to do with those pencils, some clearly didn't. (Compare the Paul Reinman inks on X-MEN to the Chic Stone work that followed. Reinman knew what to do with breakdowns, spotting blacks and texturing, while Stone -- as on FF -- inked only what was in the pencils. I happen to like Stone's inks, but they have a real "coloring book" look compared to Reinman, or Dick Ayers.)

One of the things Kirby used to do, from what I can tell, is draw costumes in detail only the first time they appeared -- literally, in the first panel only -- and then leave it for the inker to carry those details thru to subsequent drawings. Look closely at Magneto's first appearance, for instance. His costume changes with the turn of a page.

Given the amount of work he was being called upon to produce, this was a very practical way for Kirby to work, but as we have seen, it had its dangers. It only took an inker not filling in blacks a few times for black areas to turn blue, and for the blue to become carved in stone. (Altho he was inking his own work, this also happened to Ditko, and Spider-Man. As deadline pressures mounted, consciously or unconscioulsy, Ditko dropped blacks from Spider-Man's costume, until it turned "blue".)

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As I became more and more aware of the process behind the comics, I also became aware of what I might called "tonnage" in Kirby's work. It was as if he produced the same AMOUNT of work, every month, so if he was penciling fewer titles, he put more into the pages of what he was doing.

The other end of this spectrum is reflected in the famous story of Kirby asking for a raise, and the bean counters at Marvel refusing, but telling him it was okay to up his output, and therefore his income, by "drawing less". Supposedly this was the reason behind the rather abrupt shift in the Seventies to four panel pages and lots more splashes.