This One’s About Sal

As a really little kid, my comicbook reading was a bit haphazard … I lived with my grandparents most of those early years, and both of my uncles would have comics lying around the house. Thus, I don’t really remember ‘buying’ comics when I was little (or having them bought for me, I guess) … comics were just always around! Mostly Spider-man stuff, with some Hulks thrown in for good measure…

Anyway, the first Sal Buscema-drawn comic I remember coming across was PETER PARKER, THE SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN #19…

And just barely! Looking back, it appears THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #181 came out that very same month, and checking the publication dates, THE INCREDIBLE HULK #225, which is the first Hulk comic I remember ever reading was apparently already out and heck, may have even been in our house, waiting for me to find it…

I was really young and dumb, and these comics just appeared around our home. I had no idea how you got a comicbook. Maybe Stan Lee came in the night, dropping off issues of MARVEL TALES to the good little boys and girls? That would explain why I didn’t wake up to find comics of my own…

But I own all three of these, now. Coverless, beat to pieces, re-read a million times. They may have belonged to one of my uncles, but they stayed with me.

And yeah, this issue of Spidey really stuck with me … I still smile when I go back and look at it. Sure, Sal’s later Spidey stuff was spectacular (sorry), but I loved even his first go round with the web-head…

So over the years, as I fell further and further into the brain-rotting world of comicbooks, Sal was everywhere. EVERYWHERE. Not only was he a staple on THE INCREDIBLE HULK…

But he was prolific enough that he might appear anywhere else along with his regular duties on ol’ greenskin.

Oh, hey … weird fact. I LOVE the U-Foes. Because of these comics.

So yeah … Sal was there from the beginning. When I fell in love with comics, he was at ground zero.

It was pretty wild then, years and years later, when Chris Ryall asked if I would be interested in penciling a DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS series…

With Sal Buscema inking.

I mean, OF COURSE I said yes! I have NO IDEA why Chris thought of me for this one … I’d done some IDW stuff before, like the SNAKE EYES miniseries that came out around the first GI JOE movie, but really … there had to be plenty of guys interested in drawing D&D, and especially if it meant they’d get to work with Sal, right? So I don’t know how I ended up with the book, but I do know Chris was maybe just as excited as I was to have Sal on the project…

(And yes, Chris has turned me onto ROM. I missed it when it originally came out, but I’ve been reading the collected editions recently…)

Not long after, I got the script and set to work…

Doing my best (which wasn’t good enough), trying to make D&D fans happy and show Chris that he made the right call. I was pretty excited to see what the inks were going to look like…

And then a few weeks later, I got an email from Chris. He passed along a phone number and told me that Sal wanted me to call him.

My heart sank. Was I about to get ripped a new one by one of my heroes..? I was pretty sure I was. I hadn’t done a ton of stuff yet, but I’d been in comics long enough to know that sometimes you’re better off dealing with people via email … or not at all. It seemed like people usually got on the phone for the bad news.

And let’s face it. I was working hard, but I knew damn well Sal could pencil AND ink this thing on his own and it’d look 100% better. Maybe he was just gonna make sure I was aware of that fact.

“Kid, you suck, and even I can’t save this sorry excuse for a comic!”

But I called him, prepared for the worst.

And now, when I look back on the books I’ve worked on, the places we’ve gotten to visit, the people I’ve met in this crazy business … those phone calls with Sal are one of the very BEST things about my time in comics. Because that first call was just that … the first one. We’d end up talking pretty regularly throughout our time on D&D. He’d give me a call, ostensibly to talk over the newest pages I’d sent him, but really … our calls went all over the place. From art to Marvel in the 70’s and 80’s to bowling to never retiring because why stop doing something you love just to sit around..?

Oh, and the reason he’d asked me to call him that first time? I was using some crappy paper that wouldn’t take his quill very well. He was having a rough time with it, and asked if I could switch to another brand of paper. I’d only really been penciling up to that point, so I had no idea I’d drawn that first batch of D&D pages on something half a step up from toilet paper and then sent it to a legend.

Anyway … since he had a ton of other responsibilities, Chris wasn’t able to stay on D&D for long and had to pass the editorial reigns along to somebody else. Then soon after that, it apparently became a thing where I could no longer just FedEx pages to Sal for him to ink … he had to get set up with a printer so he could take the scans and print those out to ink the final couple of issues over blue lines. He didn’t really want to do that, and at one point told me he was going to just go ahead and leave the book … but I managed to talk him out of that in one of our marathon phone calls. I hated the thought of Sal feeling pushed off a project over shipping costs. Eventually, one of his sons helped him get set up. It worked out alright in the end … and it meant we had reason to keep giving each other a call. And anybody who knows me is probably laughing right now, because they know how much I hate to get on the phone for any reason!

But all I can say in my defense is … this was Sal Buscema 🙂

On one of those calls, I remember being really frustrated with something in the script … not that there was anything wrong with the script per se, just that I wasn’t figuring out how to set up the page or scene properly. How to tell the story. Sal told me to stop being so hard on myself, and to trust my gut. He said that I was really good at this, and that I needed to have more faith in myself. Now … I don’t even remember what part of the story I was struggling with at that time, but I remember Sal saying THAT. When Sal Buscema tells you that you belong … well, you gotta believe the man, right?

Eventually, we wrapped up the D&D thing. We talked a few times after that, but I tried not to bother him with too many random phone calls. I mean, between his other projects, his family, the bowling, the dozens of other things he filled his time with, the last thing I wanted to do was pester the guy. I’d drop him emails on his birthday or when I came across something I thought he’d get a kick out of, and then about, I dunno, eight or ten years ago or so, he agreed to ink me on the covers for a series I was going to be doing. I was pretty excited to reunite with him, but then it turned out … while I was drawing the interiors, I wasn’t going to be doing the covers…

Ah, comics.

Anyway … last spring, I think I shared this thing:

It’s a beast of a book, collecting all of the Spider-man stuff Sal did with JM DeMatteis, one of my favorite writers. Another creator I’d love to work with someday. It’s a great book, and in my opinion, it’s the best work of Sal’s career…

Think about that for a minute. This collects the run from 1991 through 1994. Sal was in his late fifties when he was doing this. He’d already drawn a million comics. He could have been coasting.

But he was doing the best work of his life instead.

That’s inspiring, right? I think so.

So when the news came that Sal had passed just a few days short of his 90^th, like everyone else … I was sad. Hell, I was heartbroken. Whether we had talked recently or not, I hate the thought of a world without Sal.

But as I went and started reading through some of his work that evening, I found myself smiling. That’s the thing, I guess. Whether it was through those phone calls or all the work he left us, I think about Sal … and I smile.

Best,

LF