Sal Buscema, one of the last illustrators for Marvel in the “Silver Age” has died last week at the age of 89. Today would have been his 90th birthday.
Sal was born in Brooklyn on January 26, 1936. He followed his older brother John into a career in art but, at first, not comic book art. Sal worked in commercial art and magazine illustration but then, in 1968, he began inking some of John’s work for Marvel and soon was drawing on his own. His clear, direct storytelling pleased most or all of the writers he worked with. His speed and dedication to meeting deadlines pleased his editors. I never heard anyone speak of Sal in less than glowing terms.
At one point or another, he drew just about every major super-hero comic that Marvel published. In the seventies, there was a period when Marvel was desperate for artists who could handle that kind of material and Sal was pressed into service as a pencil artist who did what some called “breakdowns.” That meant that he penciled the pages but not in great detail, leaving much to be left to the inker/finsiher. His rep as an artist may have been sullied a bit by some of those stories that went to not-the-best inker/finishers. As I understand it, Sal became bothered by that and eventually, though it lowered his income a bit, asked to do finished art all by himself. Some of this material was quite outstanding.
I got to interview Sal at the 2003 Comic-Con International in San Diego and we also had him on the Jack Kirby Tribute Panel. Here’s a photo from that panel…
Left to right standing, that’s Michael Chabon (author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay), Stan Lee, Sal Buscema, Larry Lieber, Stan Goldberg and me. In the front row, we have Wendy Pini and Mike Royer.
Sal was a very nice man and a very good artist and he drew a huge amount of comics that people loved. Always sad to lose someone like that.
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