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In the latest Comic Book Legends Revealed, learn how the depiction of Captain Marvel in Kingdom Come pushed Alex Ross’ art style to its limit.
Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the eight hundred and seventh installment where we examine three comic book legends and determine whether they are true or false. As usual, there will be three posts, one for each of the three legends. Click here for the first part of this installment’s legends. Click here for the second part of this installment’s legends.
NOTE: If my Twitter page hits 5,000 followers, I’ll do a bonus edition of Comic Book Legends Revealed that week. Great deal, right? So go follow my Twitter page, Brian_Cronin!
COMIC LEGEND:
Captain Marvel in Kingdom Come pushed Alex Ross’ art style to the edge, leading some fans to call his Captain Marvel “fat.”
STATUS:
True
Kingdom Come was a 1996 miniseries by Alex Ross and Mark Waid that was set in the future of the DC Universe, where Superman comes out of retirement when the superheroes of the future get out of control and are difficult to tell the “heroes” from the “villains.” However, Lex Luthor and other villains (as part of the “Mankind Liberation Front”) are working against Superman’s heroes and Luthor has Captain Marvel under his control.
That leads to an amazing battle between Superman and a brainwashed Captain Marvel during the breakout at the super-gulag that the superheroes were using to keep the rogue superbeings in custody. Their battle throughout #4 is one of the most beloved superhero fights of all-time.
The cliffhanger of #3 is one of the most iconic images of the era…
Ross was inspired by a short story in 1953’s Mad #4 called “Superduperman” by Harvey Kurtzman and Wallace Wood, an iconic parody of Superman…
I wrote in a somewhat recent Comic Book Legends Revealed how that version of “Captain Marbles” inspired Ross’ version of Captain Marvel, as he noted, “This was emulating a lot of the Wally Wood stuff from that Superduperman story [in the original Mad Comics] where [a parody of] Captain Marvel faces off against Superduper-man, and the shape of his body is so muscular. He has huge calves. That was coming from Wood. So I was thinking about that kinda body shape and how kinda furious he seemed in that story. There’s a certain quality to Captain Marvel I always thought was vaguely sinister, or at least puckish in that way of his pointed eyebrows like Peter Pan. And the squint in the eyes. And the grin, like, ‘What is he smiling about?’
However, that iconic shot of Captain Marvel also led some fans to wonder why Marvel looked almost kind of chubby at certain points in the book. That, as it turns out, was due to how Alex Ross’ art style worked. He explained it to Wizard Magazine, “I was definitely making [him larger than Superman] because the thought about Captain Marvel I’ve always had is that as much as he’s never gonna be the legend in people’s minds as Superman is, there’s always somebody who’s bigger and tougher than you are. You know, there’s a reason why Bizarro’s not in our story, because it would’ve subverted the role of what Captain Marvel needed to be. Captain Marvel is like Superman’s opposite number. It’s another version of him that is just slightly stronger.”
“The only thing I’m unhappy with is that when people look at this, they see him as really fat. In a lot of my paintings in this series, he looks kinda stumpy. I had to fight against that a lot in my own style because when you’re working off of too much photo reference, this is one of the things that can happen to you. People are generally never that tall. So I always have to increase the lower end of the body to make up for the distortion that occurs in photography.”
Isn’t that fascinating? The taller he made him, the more he had to add mass to make him. It really does push the photographic reference style to the edge, right?
Thanks so much to Alex Ross for such an interesting look at his art style.
CHECK OUT A TV LEGENDS REVEALED!
In the latest TV Legends Revealed – What is the bizarre origin of the “We’ll back after these messages” commercial bumpers during 1980s cartoons?
MORE LEGENDS STUFF!
OK, that’s it for this installment!
Thanks to Brandon Hanvey for the Comic Book Legends Revealed logo, which I don’t even actually anymore, but I used it for years and you still see it when you see my old columns, so it’s fair enough to still thank him, I think.
Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is cronb01@aol.com. And my Twitter feed is http://twitter.com/brian_cronin, so you can ask me legends there, as well! Also, if you have a correction or a comment, feel free to also e-mail me. CBR sometimes e-mails me with e-mails they get about CBLR and that’s fair enough, but the quickest way to get a correction through is to just e-mail me directly, honest. I don’t mind corrections. Always best to get things accurate!
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Here’s my book of Comic Book Legends (130 legends. — half of them are re-worked classic legends I’ve featured on the blog and half of them are legends never published on the blog!).
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