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Thursday, April 16, 2009

Aquaman (Vol.4) Preview - 1991

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This is a black and white preview edition of Aquaman (Vol.4) #1, sent to retailers to help drum up interest in the forthcoming series.

It contains the entire first issue, the cover to issue #2, as well as this intro from DC Events Rep Jerry A. Novick:
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(click to see a bigger version)

...this was generously given to me by F.O.A.M. member Vince Bartilucci when we met up at the 2009 New York Comic Con, and Vince offered the opinion that he thought penciller Ken Hooper's work actually looked better in black and white than it did in the colored book:
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...looking at pages like this, I have to agree. While I was never a big fan of Hooper's work on the series at the time, looking over this preview copy I'm struck by how flattened out his stuff seemed to be once it was colored.

Another thing that occurs to me about this is, say what you want, comic companies at times do put a lot of work into selling their books--putting together preview editions like this and sending them all over the country (this is pre-internet, remember) seems like a lot of effort just to sell a couple of extra copies of a book with a $1 price tag.

I have another preview copy like this for another Aquaman series, but have yet to dig it out to write a post about it. But since Vince handed me this one, I had the presence of mind to get to it much sooner than I would have on my own. Thanks Vince!

5 comments:

BentonGrey said...

Well, they may have done a preview comic to help drum up interest...but these are also the same guys who's various attempts to monkey with the character have forced a lot of the worst elements of the last fifty years on us....including the severed hand.

Anonymous said...

While I never loved Hooper's artwork on the title I didn't mind it either. And I really enjoyed this run; as short as it was. The series was graced with some beautiful covers too.

Luis said...

That Aquaman drawing of Aquaman is very akward looking, his waist and hips look a bit too feminine. The inking saves the poor drawing a bit.

Vincent Paul Bartilucci said...

You're very welcome, Rob!

I've said it before and I'll say it again, I really liked this series. While the real draw of this run was Shaun McLaughlin's scripts, I felt that Ken Hooper told an effective story.

If they would have just let him cut Arthur's damn hair!

Shaun McLaughlin said...

You should have seen it before the inks. The inker on that series didn't help Ken's work very much.