Mike Masters sent me this…
I enjoyed your recent piece on John Buscema, an artist whose work I admired greatly. I was aware he preferred doing historical work or Conan, and near the end, Marvel had him do a long form standalone Arthurian adaptation and noted it was a passion project for the artist.
From what you said, telling him "I really enjoyed your 2nd Avengers run, especially 'Siege' wouldn't necessarily get the response one expected. This got me to wondering. Can you think of other people in comics or film who are less than thrilled to be associated with what they are most known for? I read years ago that Vivian Vance was horrified she'd go through life with people thinking she was actually married to William Frawley and Alec Guinness seemed to be embarrassed by Star Wars.
Was Curt Swan proud of his work on Superman? What about Ditko and Spider-Man? Jack Kirby and anything? (Please don't tell me you're embarrassed by Blackhawk; that'd be heartbreaking.) In a nutshell, is Buscema the exception or was he just more vocal?
If you'd told John Buscema you loved some work he did on The Avengers, he would have thanked you and possibly muttered something about how he hoped you also saw certain of his other projects. Don't mistake being prouder of one piece of work than another for not being proud of the latter.
Everyone with any body of work is happier with certain jobs than others. They can't expect you to rank what they've done in the same order and — speaking for myself here — sometimes, it's nice to hear that someone liked something I didn't think turned out so well. Makes me think, "Well, maybe that wasn't as big a disaster as I thought."
Actually, John told people that the work he least enjoyed at Marvel was in 1969 and 1970 when they had him drawing stories for My Love and Our Love Story. I thought the work was outstanding and I know a lot of artists collect those issues as examples of how to draw beautiful women…but Buscema thought the stories were stupid. And again, he was drawing people in modern day dress and settings which didn't interest him half as much as fantasy material, especially the kind that oozed testosterone.
Generally speaking, creators and performers love compliments but sometimes, you may hit on a sore spot. I don't know anything about how Alec Guinness felt about Star Wars but it wouldn't surprise me if someone who'd done so much fine, respected work had some problem with people who only knew him as Obi-Wan-Kenobi and seemed to not know he'd done anything else of note.
Late in life, Henry Fonda picked up some serious money doing ads like this…
He was amused — or maybe "bemused" is this right word — that so many younger people he met thought of him as a commercial spokesguy. They didn't care, if they even knew, that he'd been in The Grapes of Wrath, The Ox Bow Incident, My Darling Clementine, Mister Roberts, 12 Angry Men and dozens of other great films. (By the way, the little girl in that commercial is Jodie Foster.)
I've seen some actors bothered if someone praises long ago work and says nothing about more recent accomplishments. What they hear is "Gee, you were good a long time ago!" When I met Robert Morse, for example, he was pleased that I didn't act like How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying was the only thing of note he'd ever done. Imagine if you were Jodie Foster and people kept telling you today, "Oh, I loved you in that View Master commercial with Henry Fonda!"
Vivian Vance, I have read, was bothered by people calling her "Ethel" and thinking she was the right age to be married to William Frawley, who was actually 22 years older than she was. They also didn't get along very well. Some actors do resent that people think they are the characters they play…or that one particular role is all they can do.
Swan, Ditko and Kirby were all proud of most of the things they did…and I would venture that they were all proudest of how long they'd been productive and employed. Individual stories or books might not have mattered as much to them as the lifetime batting average.
I remember how Nick Cardy was actually moved to tears on occasion by younger professionals telling him, "Your work was one of the main reasons I became an artist." He was proud of many things he'd done and frustrated that some of them had not lived up to the standard he'd tried to set for himself. But what he was proudest of was that he'd had a long, productive career and that it had meant something to someone.
