From Mike Masters comes this…
Enjoyed your discussion of inking. enjoyed even more your comments about Wally Wood. I thought Wally Wood's brief stint on Justice Society in the 70s and his take on Golden Age Superman were magical. One wonders what a longer stint on Superman would've been like.
Is there anyone of that era you would have particularly liked to have seen on a book they didn't do? DC famously offered Jack Kirby the regular Superman book but he turned it down. Are there any other "almost happened" situations that you would have liked to have seen? On the other hand, any "almost happened" that you think would've turned out badly?
When Jack went to DC in 1970, he was sorta/kinda offered Superman but not really. The character was in a state of flux then because sales were down and the property's long-time editor Mort Weisinger had been retired, somewhat against his will. So there was a lot of talk about "What do we do with Superman?" and assigning their new "get," Jack Kirby to it was discussed, if only to flatter Jack when he was being courted.
I don't think that could ever have worked out. DC was never in a trillion years going to let creative control of Superman happen outside their office and Jack would not have been Jack if he'd had to deal with all their rules about how the character had to be treated. They wouldn't even let his drawings of Superman be published without serious retouching to make them look like the character had always looked.
I think Wally Wood would have had much the same problem if he'd gotten the assignment when he was, in my opinion, at his creative peak. Wood was a guy who did his best work when he was left alone and the management of DC Comics during that period was never going to leave anyone alone; not when they were doing the main Superman strip at least. They didn't even leave Jack alone on characters he created.
There is really no one from that period — writer or artist — I would have liked to see assigned to a comic created by someone else. There are people I think could have done a better job on certain established properties than the people who did them but I would have liked to see my fave writers and artists baking from scratch. I'd have liked to see them produce a comic born out of their own interests and ideas rather than have them assigned to an existing book just because it needed a writer and/or artist.
And I know some reading this will say, "Well, this artist did a great Batman" and "This writer did a great Hulk" and I might agree with you. But I would have liked to see what that artist and writer could have come up with without being saddled by decades of what had come before. And had their work compared to those who had come before them.
