DC Comics Presents #66
By Len Wein and Joe Kubert.
While the legendary artist made his name with the soaring adventures of Hawkman, I never really thought of Joe Kubert as a quintessential superhero artist - he was always the dynamic hand behind DC's war comics (nobody could draw the impact of bullets in the dust, or the gritted teeth of a GI charging a machine gun nest, quite like he could) or he was getting his barbarian on with his thunderous Tor and Tarzan comics.
But it's little surprise that the most successful school of comic art bears his name, because Kubert really could do anything, and would occasionally give us some small treasures, like this issue of DC Comics Presents from 1983.
It's a typically disposable issue of the Superman team-up series, with Len Wein's plot featuring the Demon helping Kal-El with the magical wooded horror of Blackbriar Thorn, but it's the artwork that makes it so good.
Superman is slightly off model in a pleasing way, a lot more intense than the cuddly Curt Swan version. A decade earlier they were making the faces Kirby put on Superman more palatable, but there was slightly more flexibility in the brief years before Crisis rebooted everything, and Kubert's Kal-El is grittier, more pointed than anything anyone ever did.
There was something similar with Gil Kane's Superman comics around the same time, and after years of conformity, it was good to have a Superman who was a bit more sleek, a bit more gnarled and slightly sharper than the usual, while still bringing loads of thrusting thrills in the grandest superhero tradition. There are no Nazis throwing grenades across the page to gun down, or Tarzan leaping on the back of a great ape, but Kubert could do it all.
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