I liked Batman as a kid, but I’ve always been a Superman fan… well maybe not for a small segment of time back in the late 90’s and early 00’s! Even before Batman 89 hit the screens, I was so caught up into the awesome hype of it all; I loved it!
I had baseball cards, fan magazines, shirts, keychains, toys, models, the tiger electronics handheld, soda cups and all sorts of merchandise! Strangely, I haven’t kept any of those in my old age except for the comics I bought at that time.
My prized possession from all of those things was the movie adaptation by Denny O’Neil and the jaw dropping art from Jerry Ordway. As a Superman and Crisis fan, I was already familiar with mr. Ordways amazing art, but he really outdid himself with the adaptation! It’s probably the only comic book movie adaptation that really made me feel like I was watching the movie all over again.
I can’t possibly come close to mr. Ordway’s artwork, but in a way this is not only a tribute to the movie but to his astounding artwork in that comic. My fav’rit!
I don’t think a ton of people know Jerry Ordway nowadays, but he was drawing a lot of Superman when the John Byrne reboot happened in the mid 80s. And he also had a huge part inking most of Crisis on Infinite Earths.
But, since I’m dorking out on his stuff right now, I took some pictures for you from my Batman 89 movie adaptation!
It’s so good. He’s able to maintain good quality of likenessess throughout the book, but it’s not stiff. And he does some very cool inking techniques. And I just recently found out he was doing all this along with other projects and on a tight deadline! It sounded like a crazy project to be on, but man it’s so great!
They’re doing a reprint of it in hardcover soon, so I’m gonna be all over that!
"Without Al, I decided to be a glutton for punishment and ink the comic myself, despite the killer schedule, which was 64 pages, plus two covers, in two and a half months time. "
Just reading that makes me want to keel over. What a wild ride they had bringing the novel together, though! I do like that he mentioned that it wasn’t as easy as just looking at the film slides and copying them line for line. Sometimes I think people underestimate what these kinds of adaptations involve. Ty for the read!
Anytime. I follow him on twitter and he seems like a nice guy. I actually asked him how he was able to output so much work at such a high quality when he was drawing Superman monthly and he himself said he had no idea how he did it either!