Career Girl Romances

Originally posted February 2009:

Here's an Aparo job so rare that it's not in my collection...yet! Career Girl Romances #40 has an Aparo cover and an 8-page story illustrated by Jim.

Our cover girl here strikes me as very reminiscent of the girls that John Romita used to draw when he was one of DC's primary romance artists...and, for that matter, when he was drawing groovy chicks like Gwen Stacy and Mary Jane Watson on Spider-Man! The jazzy backing musicians, though, are a bit more in the Aparo style.

This one's from 1967, during Jim's first year in the comic book business, toiling away at Charlton. At this stage, Aparo's line work is delicate, which was generally expected of artists on romance comics. The inking is, in fact, barely recognizable as Jim's, but he was doing what was expected as he started to make his way in the business.

Note that he's drawn a left-handed guitarist here...I wonder if he was working from some photo reference of a lefty, or whether he just opted for a figure that better suited the cover composition? Whatever the case, I've got to give him credit for drawing a more convincing guitarist than many comics artists of the era that attempted to depict musicians. The microphone position is a little off, and the drum kit is sparse, but over all, it's a good stab at drawing a combo with a sexy girl singer, don't you think?

UPDATE:
Now that I've got a copy of the actual issue, here's Jim's splash page from the interior story:

It looks like Dick Giordano did the cover, based on Jim's interior work. Dick altered the girl's face and adjusted her pose, but the guitarist and drummer adhere to Aparo's work. 

Aparo credited in Batman v. Superman!

If you watched through all of the film Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, you saw Jim Aparo thanked in the credits:

Presumably, the credit is in acknowledgement of the filmmakers' taking some inspiration from Jim's rendition of Bruce Wayne and Diana Prince in Brave and Bold #158:

The film includes a visually similar scene with Bruce and Diana attending a high class social event, although one without Dick Giordano attending!
Then again, it could be a more general acknowledgement of Jim as the Graphical Guru of Batman team-ups!

An SF illustration from Phoenix, a 1970 Fanzine

Aparo Art in Convergence: Green Arrow #1, April 14, 2015

OK, not much Aparo art, but look closely at this page, the second of two recapping the history of Green Arrows Oliver Queen and Connor Hawke:

Down there at the bottom? A panel from one of the issues of Green Arrow that Jim drew in the 1990's:

More Aparo art is used here for their look back at Azrael as posted at DC's website.

An Aparo Cover on a New DC Comic?!

The Chip Kidd Variant cover to DC's Batman and the Outsiders #1, part of DC's April "Convergence" event, will be using a Jim Aparo drawing of the team's Geo-Force character as its source. Other variants are employing the work of classic Silver and Bronze Age artists, such as Joe Kubert (Hawkman #1), Don Heck (Wonder Woman #1), Dick Giordano (Justice Society of America #1), and even Sheldon Mayer (World's Finest Comics #1)! It's nice to see the work of these legends appearing on covers again, if just this once.

Brave and Bold: The Lost Issues?!

Check out this wild blog from Ross:

http://braveandboldlost.blogspot.com/

Starting with scans of classic (mostly) Aparo covers (from Brave and the Bold as well as other series), Ross produces imaginative glimpses of team-ups that never were...and, in many cases, never could have been! The digital surgery is much more neatly done than most of the Photoshopped work one often finds on the web, with Ross very neatly merging Jim's work with the art of artists like John Byrne and Gil Kane (among many)--an impressive job considering Ross uses the much-maligned Microsoft Paint to get his results!

Favorites of mine include the team-ups of Batman with Captain Kirk of Star Trek, Air Wave, and Black Panther!

Great fun, Ross!

Aparo on the Web: The Spectre

At The Bronze Age of Blogs, Pete Doree treats us today to "The Wrath of the Spectre". Pete offers up some well-deserved praise for the Orlando/Fleischer/Aparo/Carley run from the 1970's in Adventure Comics, and serves up scans of the first installment for your reading pleasure. I was struck by this comment of Pete's:

[Aparo's] art also had the 'cool' factor, something indefinable that only Gil Kane's could match. Every one of his characters somehow just looked unspeakably cool, like the greatest Rat Pack movie never made.

Well said, Pete! Anyone who's seen Jim's rendition of the Spectre's alter ego, Detective Jim Corrigan, would probably agree. Corrigan wasn't the only stylish and suave gentleman to grace Jim's pages--I'd add his renditions of Bruce Wayne, Oliver Queen and Scott Free to the Aparo "Rat Pack", just for starters.

Elsewhere on the web, the Groovy Agents serves up Brave & Bold #116, a team-up of Batman and the Spectre that ran contemporaneous to the Spectre solo series that Pete samples (see above).