Mark Howland UNITED STATES
Member Since December 2004
77 Artworks | Watched by 61

Q&A with Mark Howland

Which piece in your gallery is your favorite and why?

Ditko. No, Kirby. No, no, Romita, Sr. Frazetta. Wait! Including strip art?? Carol Day. I'm lost. The Marvel Bullpen, I grew up with. David Wright adopted me much later.

Please tell us a little about yourself.

I'm a high school English teacher. I get paid by the word.

How long have you been collecting comic art and what prompted you to start?

Since the early 2000s. Because I'm slow, I didn't know you could collect comic art before then.

How do you display/store your collection at home?

Hang and hide, walls and closet.

What are your top five most wanted original pages or commissions?

FF 48 cover. We're joking here, right? Alrighty, then: any Ditko ASM title splash. Or any ASM Romita, Sr interior page with Spidey fighting the Goblin.

Grail

Added to Site: 9/15/2021 Owner : Owner: Mark HowlandPaid Member
Jack Kirby Black Magic 1 Unpublished Cover
When I first saw this cover, I was struck by Kirby’s ability to render and capture - yet again - a climactic moment. Additionally, I enjoyed seeing all the production information noted on, and adhered to, the board.

Ultimately, I wonder why this image failed to satisfy Kirby. The 1950 published cover to Prize Comics Black Magic 1 utilizes an image from another story in the issue. And when DC Comics reprinted the series in 1974, they used a different Kirby cover image for this story, one which I don’t think is as effective.

What do I know, but it seems to me that Kirby had an effective alignment for drama here, the pivotal female figure being front and center and flanked by the two male figures. Kirby liked that arrangement of characters enough to repeat it for the covers of DC’s reprints of Black Magic 12 and 16 in the 1970s.

If you know anything about this cover, please invite me to join the club. In the meantime, thanks to Bechara of Nostalgic Investments!

Update: Thanks to Harry Mendryk for supplying cover images for the two additional, rejected covers to Black Magic 1 by Kirby. Also, on the back of my unpublished BM cover are two notations (see additional images below): "Mr. Meese" and, in Arabic, "parrot series." If you have any information, please share.

About The Owner

Member Since: December 2004
Last Login: April 2026
Ebay Id: howmark
Website: http://www.comicartfans.com
Country: UNITED STATES
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