don't judge a book by it's cover...

Cougar

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This guy certainly doesn't look like Steve Perry but....

Mr. Natural?

MNPC.167.B.gif
 

dreadnut

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Great voice there!

"What does it all mean, Mr. Natural?" (Any old hippie should know the correct answer.)
 

adorshki

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Mr Natural's first comic book appearance was in Zap Comix #1:
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BUT it's easy to forget that the first Zap Comix was actually number 0:
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Zap covers were done by many of the same guys who produced posters for concerts:
Rick Griffin:
$_3.JPG

Victor Moscoso (one of my top 5 all-time favorite poster artists):
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I was always kinda partial to the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers:
fabulousfurryfreakbrothersdopesurvival.jpg

and Fat Freddy's Cat:
fat-freddys-cat-def1d0d2-0860-45cf-88dc-551cce140d1-resize-750.jpeg


And Dr. Atomic:
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BUT ya know who really started it all?
Steve Ditko with Dr. Strange:
DS1.jpg

From here:

"While Ditko seemed to lose interest in Spidey at the end of his run, his love of Doctor Strange just got stronger, climaxing in an epic serialized battle between the Master of the Mystic Arts and his two main adversaries, Baron Mordo and the Dread Dormammu. The fight took place in a string of cliff-hanger tales for over a year, from No. 130 to No. 146, the first true continuous modern “story arc” as we know it. On this page, a highlight of the tale, Strange makes his way to the embodiment of the cosmos, Eternity, across one of the gonzo trans-dimensional vistas Ditko was known for concocting. These mind-blowing not-landscapes were a huge influence not just on cosmic comics, but on the whole ‘60s counterculture: Later this same year the first major psychedelic concert would be held in San Francisco, and it’d be called “A Tribute to Doctor Strange".
And he never even touched the stuff.
Seriously.
And probably a good thing, too!
 

walrus

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I shudder to think what his art would look like if he DID touch the stuff! Ditko is the best, IMHO!

walrus
 

dreadnut

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I remember one Freak Bros. plot where some radicals had drugged the San Francisco water system with a compound like LSD that would turn everyone in the city gay, they called the stuff "Tee-Hee-Hee." Gilbert Sheldon was a very funny man. I sure wish I had all my Freak Bros comics back.
 

Minnesota Flats

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I always thought that Ditko's stuff was the highlight of the "Tales to Astonish"(and so on) comics I read when I was a kid.
 

adorshki

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Steve-Ditko-2.jpg


And it's a little known fact he even tooled Iron Man at least once:
d6dae53618bcec53455dafd208014913.jpg

The issue that featured Iron Man's first "armor revision".
Ditko designed the iconic red and gold look for Iron Man, something for which he rarely receives credit:
Tales-Of-Suspense-48-Iron-Man-armor-sequence.jpg

Unfortunately Dick Ayers/Paul Reinman's inks weren't the best match for Ditko.
Marvel was experiencing explosive growth launching new characters and they had yet to recruit the better artists and inkers that would fill out the core of Kirby and Ditko by mid '65.
Suspect Steve was called in for emergency backup, much like he was for the last issue of the Incredible Hulk; this would have been fall of '64 and Kirby was handling Thor, the Fantastic Four, The Avengers, X-Men, Ant Man/Giant Man in Tales to Astonish, "layouts" and virtually all of the covers (except Spiderman).
(Speaking of don't judge a book by its cover:)
Kirby had been tasked with creating a unified Marvel "look", thus all the cover work, and layouts for series that necessarily had to be delegated to the second string of artists.
 
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