Marshall Quick and a Foozle (in eclipse)


 


I hate this.
I don't want to say that Marshall Rogers was a friend of mine, how talented he was, and how he deserved the fame he god and didn't deserve the waning of that fame--for obvious reasons. I don't even want to admit that death is inevitable--but there you go.

One thing I'd like to emphasize that others might not is that Marshall was a pioneer when it was not all that easy to be a pioneer. During the time I was in that penumbral state of being a mere fan/letterhack but knowing a fair number of actual godlike professionals, There were absolutely only two games in town for superhero comics, and that was Marvel and DC. The comicbook store had yet to be born, and comics newsstand publishing was a terribly punishing thing, as the failure of Atlas Comics and Skywald seemed to teach. (Yes Jim Warren still published Creepy and Eerie, and Gold Key still published the odd original series--but for the most part, if you wanted to do the kind of comics people wanted to do, it was the Two Big Guys, or there was nuthin'.)
The frustration among large numbers of people was thick and palpable--and it was therefore with a great deal of excitement that I hovered about as fellow letterhack Dean Mullaney and GLP Don McGregor (who had gathered about him a feverishly loyal claque theough his openness and passionate honesty) worked with GLP Paul Gulacy to produce the first book from Eclipse Publishing, Sabre. At the time, the only ways to sell the book were mail order and setting up tables at comics conventions, and color printing was out of the question. But a great leap forward was being made--a leap that, we were convinced, the comics medium desperately needed.
Don's next project with Dean was another step into the unknown--a book called Detectives, Inc. Sabre was at least a future science/fantasy adventure--but Detectives? Just that: no costumes, no mecha, no power bolts--coming out of Don's affinity for Ed McBain and Ross McDonald (as well as I Spy and The Naked City.) Again, this may seem less than earth-shaking to readers used to comics stores and graphic albums in Barnes & Noble--but the all encompassing grip of Superhero/SF/Fantasy on the industry at that point was overwhelming.

Enter Marshall.

Not only was Marshall a beautiful match artistically for the book (including the black and white aspect), but he came in, absolutely unperturbed by any possible professional repercussions--in a time when such repercussions were very real.
That was Mr. Rogers--making daring creative moves, not out of any sense of how hot an artist he was (and he was), but out of a simple sense of, why would you want to do this any other way?
Another less obvious pioneering move, but perhaps even more significant, was when Marshall came to Roger Stern at Marvel and said that he wanted to do Dr. Strange for a year. Twelve issues, and that would be it. Again, this does not seem like any sort of a big deal these days, but this was before the miniseries or maxi-series and the companies just didn't work that way--which most of the time meant that artists took on permanent book assignments until they quit an unspecified time later by angrily throwing the class ring and letter jacket back in the company's face. But Marshall made the unprecedented offer, and Roger (a really smart guy and an underrated writer--sometimes, I think, for his constant preference for what's appropriate for the character over flashier moves)--Roger, I said, eagerly agreed and rose to the occasion by doing some of the best writing of his career. And Marshall once again made some history.

I got to know Marshall pretty well--from hanging out with Don and Chris Claremont (with whom Marshall did Daughters of the Dragon) and Sterno--in general (and this is what adds a touch of maror to this whole stew) the comics people in NYC of that time was very much a community: most of us got to know each other, attend the same parties, waste the same time up at the offices, go out to bad movies on Friday night--and an artistic community, though not as bad as a frient, is a tough thing to lose.

And from Batman to Detectives Inc. to Daughters of the Dragon to Coyote to Scorpio Rose to Dr. Strange to my favorite work of his, Cap'n Quick and a Foozle --Marshall could jump from genre to genre and, even though his heroes could look unheroic at times, his work was seductive because he always paid thoughtful attention to the way the actual page looked and worked--and worked hard to make the environments his characters moved through, be it Manhattan, Gotham City, or the dimension of the Dread Dormammu, fully realized. It wasn't very hard to find people to talk about him picking up Walt Simonson's graphic delights and running with them--but I, at least, saw there the care and thought that artists like Bernard Krigstein and and Jim Steranko brought to the crafting of a comics page. Sometimes you could look at an isolated drawing of his and say "this guy was popular?" But never a whole page--or a story. No, dammit, his popularity was no fluke.

I'll admit that the stupidest and most self-centered thought I had when I learned of his passing was, "Crap. Another artist I'm never going to get to work with." Because it never dies, even though we do.

Marshall grew up about ten miles from where I did--Ardsley New York, just down route 9 from Tarrytown and route 9A from Elmsford: we might have even been at the same football games (Sleepy Hollow played Ardsley), if I ever went to football games, which I didn't. When the proper playing field came along, though, there we were. It was wonderful to see him play.

Had some moves on him, Marshall did.

Good-bye, my friend. Flocks of foozles sing thee to thy rest.

Posted: Wednesday - March 28, 2007 at 02:08 AM        

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