Sunday, February 28, 2010

Sutton Whodunnit?


The cover above for Charlton's Doomsday +1 debut issue is one of the all-time greats. It's a bit rough in the details, but the scope of the image is magnificent and it establishes the basics of the story we're about to experience instantly. You know exactly what this comic book is about.

This cover is by John Byrne, the young artist who cuts his teeth on this series before galloping off to Marvel to make his reputation as one of the Bronze Age's mightiest talents. But apparently there's a strain of thought out there that this cover is not by Byrne, but by another Charlton stalwart, Tom Sutton.


I don't understand why anyone would think this. Tom Sutton is called upon many years later to craft another chapter to this six-issue saga of astronauts returned to a world demolished by atomic war, but he did not have anything to do with its early genesis that I'm aware of. You can almost see Byrne's signature underneath the fallen U.S. flag in the corner, obscured by some publisher numbers.

This is Byrne through and through.


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2 comments:

  1. It's hard sometimes to understand where these things get started, especially as in this case when the evidence of the eyes is so compelling.

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