Colan: Visions of a Man without Fear Opens in San Francisco
Gene Colan’s artistic career will receive the retrospective treatment as San Francisco’s Cartoon Art Museum presents Colan: Visions of a Man without Fear, opening November 15 and running through March 15, 2009.
On December 4, there will be a special opening reception with Gene and Adrienne Colan in attendance.
The exhibition will include over 40 examples from Colan’s long creative career, from his one and only story illustrated for legendary publisher EC Comics in 1952, through his career-defining work for Marvel Comics from the 1960s and 1970s on titles as diverse as Iron Man, Tomb of Dracula and Howard The Duck, to his notable run on DC Comics’ Batman in the 1980s, to his more recent efforts, including illustrations commissioned by his fans and his beautiful pencil artwork on titles such as Michael Chabon’s The Escapist, published by Dark Horse Comics.
Guest Curator Glen David Gold, author of the novel, Carter Beats the Devil, put the museum show together. An exhibition catalog featuring high-quality reproductions of Colan’s artwork and essays from many of his most notable collaborators, including writers Stan Lee, Marv Wolfman, Roy Thomas and Steve Englehart, will be available at the Cartoon Art Museum prior to the exhibition’s opening reception on December 4.
For those unfamiliar with Gene “The Dean”, he was born in New York in 1926 and studied at the Art Students League of New York under illustrator Frank Riley and surrealistic Japanese painter Kuniashi. After a stint in the army, Colan’s official career in comics began in 1944 at Fiction House and Timely.
Now that comics have earned mainstream respectability, can videogames be far behind? Henry Lowood, curator of the History of Science and Technology Collections at Stanford University, is at the forefront of gaining recognition of this hobby and industry as having "a history worth preserving and a culture worth studying."
Following Marvel’s lead, DC Comics is entering the direct-to-DVD animated feature business with the first of a slate of programs featuring their popular heroes.
