Friday, March 02, 2012

Cuban Hero

Friday Comic Book Day.

I have always found Ric Estrada to be a pretty cool artist.I know him best from his work for Warren and DC . He did do some stuff for EC as well, I believe for one of Harvey Kurzman's war books. But none of that is what makes him so cool - it's his autograph. Anyone with such a swinging ignature must be a fun guy.

His style is swinging as well. He is not as good as the great stylists of the late fifties, Alex Toth or Mort Meskin or Bernie Kigstein. But he has something of them all, the same love of bold chiascuro work, tempered by a solid understanding of anatomy. I have always suspected he must have had a real job on the side, seeing how little work he did. and indeed, he seems to hav elived and worked in Germany for a while in the sixties.

Here is some work of his I didn't know yet, for St. John's Teen-Age Romances. Stylish fun, I'd say.




















3 comments:

Peter Huggan said...

Wow, amazing stuff! I like his Layouts more than Toth! He really selects some difficult angles to draw...I wonder if his day job was at an ad agency. His stuff is really slick!

Peter Huggan said...

I can't stop looking at these pages!
Look at the amazing image of the cigarette being flicked away by the foreground hand on the last page of the first story!
You are right, this guy's stuff is really fun, even if the scripts weren't.

Ger Apeldoorn said...

Your enthousiasm is contagious, Bob. I will try and find that one story he did for Justice Traps The Guilty, which I have somewhere in a British reprint.