“Reimagined Marvel Pop Art Cover Box: Sub-Mariner” (2020)

“Reimagined Marvel Pop Art Cover Box: Sub-Mariner” (2020)
by Bob Layton (1953-); colors by Shanna Layton
11 x 17, ink and watercolor on board (outline printed)

Layton started working in comics in the 1970s, famously headlining a run on Iron Man that introduced Stark’s alcoholism, Bethany Cabe, James Rhodes, and Justin Hammer. He wrote the revival of the original X-Men as X-Factor after Jean Grey’s return, and he was an architect for the Valiant Comics universe (and the company behind it).

He enjoys doing commissions, and I had thought for a while what I would want him to do for me. As a child of the 60s, I was squarely in the crosshairs of classic Marvel Comics as the phenomenon grew. Looking for the iconic corner boxes for any new issues splayed out in a wooden magazine rack at my hometown’s newsstand and variety store was a staple of my youth.

Marvel went through about a 4-month period (Sept-Dec 1965), where Stan Lee thought it was a good idea to grab the zeitgeist of the era and re-christened the name from “Marvel Comics Group” to “Marvel Pop-Art Productions.” There was a backlash and you have this memorably short run of issues with that logo.

So, here is my homage to those four months. Four reimagined corner boxes featuring Captain America, Iron Man, Hulk, and Sub-Mariner (four of the five who made up the famously done cartoons in 1966… sorry, Thor… and the headliners from Tales of Suspense and Tales to Astonish. It’s fun to have these usually small objects filling the space on a page. I selected the figures for Bob to put into his style and I wanted the figures breaching those boxes so that they were not so hemmed in, compositionally. The “Pop Art” letters were rarely colored in during those 4 months, but for these, it helps pull the vertical all the way up the page.

For Sub-Mariner, I picked the issue number and month of the appearance of his first solo comic in the modern era (1 MAY). The image is from the John Buscema cover.