Posted on 6/19/2021

Mayerik from the 70's on has been providing some of best non super hero works right under your nose.  He doesn't get the credit mainly because he was outside the top superhero books doing Howard The Duck, Man-Thing, horror and Sci-Fi and lots of commercial / storyboard work through the years.  What vintage work has made it out there is often tough to get as fans of these genres tend to collect any and all.  This is a stunning splash and without knowing who drew it, you would have guessed names on par with those greats in their day.

Posted on 6/19/2021

Great splash from an artist who doesn't get his due. My first exposure to Mayerik's work was on the Void Indigo series he did with Steve Gerber. After reading that, I tracked down as much of his work as I could. Another great piece in your diverse collection.

Posted on 6/24/2021

Mayerik's finest moment

1 - Posted on 8/18/2021

Wonderful title splash. Mayerik was so often (but not always) unlucky being given inkers who just didn't get his lines, and here we see him inking himself and showing what he was really trying to do at Marvel. And it is, well, marvellous. (Sometimes he got the equally underrated Jack Abel, with great results, and I think Dan Adkins inks some pages of this book - so it worked out well on occasion.) The organic, twisting scenery makes an appropriate frame for the patchwork creatures, and the handling of distance, in the light brushwork for the mountain, is very effective. Great page!

Posted on 11/4/2022

I know it's nutty to cite one example from a decades-long artistic life, but when I was a kid Val Mayerik's Frankenstein #18... the one that he got to ink himself... was like a child's garden of evocative textures and lush, expressive brushwork. It still slays me, and my brother and I were traumatized that they cancelled the book with that last bravura issue as a harbinger of things to come!

1 - Posted on 11/5/2022

Indeed. The extra appeal for me was that this book was happening, suposedly, in my home country, although its version of "Switzreland" is pure fantasy. As a kid, went "wow, these amazing characters are having their adventure less than two hour from where I live". Frankenstein is, of course, a cultural local hero (the book was written 9 bus stops away from where I grew up). Here is a public sculpture made by a close  friend of mine in 2014:

https://www.das-geneve.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/statue-frankenstein-geneve.jpg