Tales of Syzpense #27
A Haunted Girl 4 covers, Rom young and old, the Headless Spinner Rack, and Reader Mail
The second issue of Syzygy’s newest title, A Haunted Girl, will be released in mid-November but in the meantime, the series’ concluding issue 4 is now available to order, with these three covers: the first by E.M. Gist, the B cover by André Lima Araújo and Chris O'Halloran, and the C cover by Cherrielle:
Young Rom
Like many young comic book fans, I had aspirations of writing and drawing my own comics, and made a few fumbling attempts to do so as a teenager. They’re not fit for public consumption but I did also do my humble best at homaging some artists I loved at the time.
One of the characters I tackled was Rom, Spaceknight. With hundreds of pages of good Sal Buscema Rom art available as reference, I’m not sure what possessed me to use this splash image by artist William Johnson but this is the image I chose to try to copy when I was 15:
Armed only with a pencil, a Bic pen, and felt markers, this is what resulted:
I remember at the time that Rom’s torso gave me fits, and seeing this piece again, it still bothers me that I couldn’t get that part to work no matter how much exhaust smoke I added to cover up the flaw.
The reason I show this is, a Rom forum on Facebook has been showcasing various Rom pieces by real artists every day for the past month or so, and over the weekend, they put up my piece, albeit with some doctoring to try to make it work a bit better. It certainly doesn’t deserve to be included alongside some of the great pieces they’ve been posting but it made me smile to see this. Thanks to Chris Weppler for making the coloring look better than I could ever do with felt pens.
The Headless Spinner Rack
Despite now having more than enough Halloween-related covers to fill both spinner racks, I seem to keep picking them up when I come across something good, in part because horror comics deserve year-round inclusion in the rack. This was the most recent addition:
In general, I prefer my headless horsemen with flaming pumpkin heads but the flaming skull works here, too.
I did already run a wide array of horror-related comic covers a couple weeks back but I’ve always loved creepy pumpkins so I thought we should end October with one more round of Halloween covers.
This time, trying to be more targeted, the offerings include only covers with pumpkins or pumpkin heads (but not Pumpkinheads; that seemed too easy). I also mostly stayed away from covers featuring the character Jack O’Lantern, again because it seemed too easy (both Marvel and DC have a character by that name, so it’d be real easy to fill a spinner rack with just those covers), but a worthy cover featuring Marvel’s Jack did slip through here.
Of this first set, was there ever a better artist at depicting scary jack o’lanterns—or anything horrific—than the artist of these first two covers, Bernie Wrightson? Bernie was born a few days before Halloween so maybe it was inevitable that he’d cover such all-hallow’d ground throughout his career.
That said, the late Tim Sale sure did draw a great jack o’lantern and other Halloween-related images as well, as he proved repeatedly on all of his Batman: The Long Halloween covers, starting with the one below.
Of these nine images, the Angel: Masks cover was one that I helped bring into existence a while back. The artist is Aussie painter Jeremy Geddes, who also created a series of great covers for our presciently named Doomed magazine, too.
I know the first image below won’t fit into a comic-sized spinner rack but it was too good not to include, as Alfred E. Neuman’s ever-grinning visage was always scarier than any jack o’lantern.
Return of the Mail Bag
It’s not quite Man With a Hat levels of feedback yet but in last week’s newsletter, my Spinner Rack theme involved covers with sharks on ‘em, garnering these responses:
Dara Naraghi responded, I wonder which animal has made the most number of comic book cover appearances, sharks or gorillas?
I think gorillas win out. As former DC editorial director Irwin Donenfeld once said, "I followed every single magazine that we produced and I was able to see how certain themes would sell. For example, I discovered that gorillas sell. We had gorilla covers on Star Spangled War Stories or Wonder Woman — you name a magazine, we had a gorilla on it. You know what happened? Sales exceeded our expectations."
And DC EiC Carmine Infantino once put together a list of Seven Things Guaranteed to Sell a Comic If Shown on the Cover, and the #1 thing on his list?
Joe Hill said, about the below cover, “Die bungling gnat” is first-rate trash talk.
Especially coming from a sentient shark…
Joe Regan said “The shark isn’t too menacing in this cover but Namor’s way of impressing the Blonde Phantom is...unusual to say the least.”
I guess when you’re competing with Captain America throwing the double-bicep pose at her and Human Torch juggling fireballs one-handed, you have to do what you can to stand out. But a couple nice lobsters might’ve been a better way to win her over than gifting her a dead shark.
Finally, Ian Chalgren, Tales of Syzpense’s “Dreamweaver” letterer and designer, offered the below cover as one of his favorite shark-related cover images. At least, I think that’s a shark that Orca, the Killer Whale is riding? Or it’s a whale with shark-like teeth? A whale-shark? I don’t think it really matters, the point is it’s a great Gil/Kane/Mike Esposito/John Romita cover. All it needs to make it an all-timer is a gorilla…
A Much More Credible Rom
Before I close things for the week, I thought I’d share a version of ROM by a real artist, as well as one more Halloween-appropriate image of the Crypt Keeper, too. In 2020 or so, the late great Neal Adams was offering to do headshots for a very accessible price, so I couldn’t resist seeing what Neal’s ROM might look like. He told me he thought no one ever drew the character better than Sal Buscema, so that’s whose art he used to inspire his own take:
Farewell to a Friend
The loss of Matthew Perry over the weekend was profoundly affecting for so many people . It certainly was for many of us Gen X’ers who came of age with the show. Chandler was definitely the character I identified with the most—and was compared to the most—and I was really moved by this gentle goodbye from artist Lucy Claire:
Pumpkin Heads are my favorite Halloween theme. Merv from SANDMAN as drawn by Mark Buckingham is one of my favorites. Great to see this in your spinner list.