Mike Wieringo Goes All Out: Hulk, Spidey, Dinosaurs, Monsters!

Pre-Amble to a Review

When my calendar alerted me this morning to the fact that today (June 26) is Mike Wieringo’s birthday, I knew I had to scramble to put something together. Since my comics collection is in shambles at the moment, I thought it would be a fun challenge to randomly run through some boxes and pull out the first comics I could find that Ringo drew. That would be the centerpiece of this year’s look back at his career.

I learned a couple of things from this experiment:

First, Mike Wieringo drew a lot of covers, particularly for independent comics in the 90s and into the early 2000s. It feels like he was always there to help a friend who needed a cover by a “name” artist who would do justice to their characters.

For the rest of us, it’s an interesting assortment of characters drawn in his style.

Second, not much has changed in the past 25 years. The two books I pulled out came from “Robin” (1996) and “The Sensational Spider-Man” (1997). They were also the first parts of larger 2- and 3-issue story arcs. So I pulled all the books out to read through them to see which sparked more thoughts.

The “Robin” storyline involved guns in school while the “Spider-Man” storyline was about climate change leading to rising waters.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. (The more things change, the more they stay the same.)

Maybe I’ll get back to Wieringo’s relatively short run on “Robin” next year, but this year I wanted to focus on his Spider-Man work.

(I later found Wieringo’s Superman comics with Joe Casey. Those deserve some fresh eyes, too. I’m just glad I’ll never run out of something to talk about…)

The Savage Land Saga

Sensational Spider-Man #13 cover by Mike Wieringo and Richard Case

Sensational Spider-Man #14 cover by Mike Wieringo and Richard Case

Sensational Spider-Man #15 cover by Mike Wieringo and Richard Case

“The Sensational Spider-Man” #13 – #15 sends Peter Parker to the Savage Land to cover a story for J. Jonah Jameson about how they’re attempting to save the island from the rising waters that the hole/thinning in the ozone layer has created. (Fun slightly positive fact: the thinning of the ozone layer around the south pole is at about the same number today (if not slightly lower) as it was when this comic was originally written.)

This being the Marvel Universe, it’s SHIELD leading this collection of journalists on a visit to help show off how the advanced technological efforts of Roxxon are being made to save the island. Roxxon is running some huge refrigeration systems around the Savage Land to keep the ice frozen.

Welcome to comic book physics.

Nowadays, we all know how refrigeration works and you have to scratch your head about how much damage is being done in running a giant refrigerator at this scale and output. This story was written at a time when the worst of the polluting refrigerators were being phased out by an international treaty, though, so perhaps it was just slightly ahead of its time.

But, hey, this is Roxxon, the prototypical evil oil company. Of course, the truth that not even SHIELD noticed is that the “refrigerators” were actually working to melt the ice faster so the island would flood and they could drill for oil there.

That’s the framework for the story, which reads like how a 90s comic plot trying to be topical would read. What’s more important is how the comics it gives us work. The good news is, it’s never a lecture on environmentalism or “late-stage” capitalism or any of that. It’s still a Marvel Universe-centric story. And writer Todd Dezago fires on all cylinders (of an evil gas-chugging internal combustion engine, of course) to bring us the story.

It’s the Savage Land, so you get Ka-zar and Shanna and Zabu. You get some SHIELD agents. There are dinosaurs a’plenty and some monsters to go along with them. And, in a massively important cameo that pays off in the third part, you get the Hulk throwing monsters around for three issues straight. He’s smiling most of the time.

This is good old-fashioned superhero storytelling here. Every issue is accessible to a first-time reader. Caption boxes help set up the story in progress so new readers can follow. Everything is a colorful, fun, and exciting free-for-all.

The imminent flooding of the Savage Land keeps coming faster and faster, making Spider-Man and Ka-zar work harder and harder to get all the residents of the island to higher ground — men, women, children, and animals all. Ticking time bombs are the best for moving stories along.

When they figure out the truth, new alliances are made and energies are expended in going after the bigger bad guy. Even then, things get exposively worse.

That’s my oh-so-clever way of hinting that there are explosions in this book. That’s important for an action comic like this. In fact, there’s a whole page full of explosions that look like this:

I love a good explosion. Todd McFarlane was great at drawing those, too, so Wieringo is in good Spider-Man company there.(Credit to Richard Starkings/Comicraft on lettering and Gregory Wright for the colors and all those line holds…

It’s just a fun superhero book to read from cover to cover.

The Mid-Career Art of Mike Wieringo Begins

This is where the creative partnership of Todd Dezago and Mike Wieringo began. In interviews with either of them, they’d often tell the tale of how much time they spent together on the phone talking about the comics they were working together on, starting with “The Sensational Spider-Man.”

Todd Dezago knew what Mike Wieringo liked the draw. He didn’t write a story and then throw it over the fence to whoever would be drawing it. This three-part storyline involved lots of things that Wieringo drew for fun on his blog. The only thing it lacked was a few gorillas. There were LOTS of those on Wieringo’s blog.

It’s an interesting time for Wieringo’s art style, too. He’s past the earliest part of his career. This is just after his “Robin” issues, so he had had a couple of series under his belt by this point. (Plus, the “Rogue” mini-series.)

His art style, in retrospect, is starting to look a little more solid by this point in this run. Richard Case’s inks, no doubt, were a big part of that. But, also, it feels like this is where his art is starting to feel comfortable and consistent for him.

Robin #25 cover by Mike Wieringo — Inks by Terry Austin!

His “Robin” run was great, if short. His style lends itself well to drawing teenage characters, and Chuck Dixon’s scripts gave him plenty of costumed action to draw. But, still, it was ultimately a crime book, a teenage drama book, and a street-level action thing. It’s not entirely where I’d say Wieringo’s greatest strengths lie.

Plus, it was still early in his career and things were not always consistent. I read those two “Robin” issues I mentioned at the beginning of this article, and there are some awkward moments in the art that you might not notice at first. There are slight issues of scale between characters in the same panel, and some limbs that get cut a little short in the foreshortened perspective.

Wieringo drew solid backgrounds solid and he moved the camera around well, but things often felt tight on the page. He had to jam a lot in to tell the story.

There’s a lot going on in the pages of these Spider-Man issues, as well, but somehow they feel a lot “lighter.” It’s like he had learned by this point how to balance out detail and camera angles and negative space in his page and panel compositions. Getting overall page composition looking balanced and attractive is a higher-level skill for artists. Wieringo was reaching that point here, I think.

Construction Characters

Ka-zar looking like a Disney prince — Ka-zar looks like a Disney lead character. Flynn Rider? Tarzan?

There’s also something special about the heads and faces, in particular, in these issues. It feels like Wieringo locked into his style by this point. The Disney influence is obvious and strong, but you can see how he’s constructing faces.

Everyone has hair of a specific shape and volume. Their waves and curls have volume and feel three-dimensional. And if many hairdos look alike, then that’s just a sign of the style of the time. I feel a bit of the manga influence in there, too.

I love Ka-Zar’s solid black eyebrows that give away his every emotion, perched just above his bright eyes.

In a way, it reminds me a bit of Todd Nauck’s work. Nauck is another artist who was coming up at around the same time. His style works well with teenage characters and his characters have distinctive faces that feel constructed from the same playbook if you know what I mean.

You know a Nauck face like you know a Wieringo face. They’re in similar schools of cartooning. (Nauck is a little more superhero influenced, but the approaches are there.)

Having said all that, imagine my surprise when I did a little reseach while writing this and realized that Todd Nauck drew a few fill-in issues for Wieringo during this series. That was a smart call.

Drawing Big Cats — Or Trying Not To

We know from everything he drew in “Tellos” that Wieringo was a big fantasy fan with lots of swashbuckling adventures and far away places. This story gives him plenty of that to draw, from the familiar Hulk to the crazier monsters and dinosaurs on the Savage Land.

Mike Wieringo/Richard Case double page spread of The Savage Land with lots of SHIELD and monsters and dinosaurs

I’m not sure how comfortable he was drawing Zabu, though. Zabu got a big moment in the third issue, but it’s in a relatively small panel. Zabu disappears for long stretches at a time, and often shows up just peeking past someone, never getting a good detailed hero shot in the three-parter. Maybe Wieringo was just more of a dog person?

Wait, I just did a search on his blog and found this:

It’s no secret that I love animals. Especially cats and dogs. And while it’s fun to draw cats, as they’re beautiful and sleek creatures, and I’ve always had cats as companions (not only because they’re such wonderful, loving animals, but they’re also much less ‘high-maintenance’ than dogs are)– I’ve always enjoyed drawing (and looking at) dogs much, much more.

So maybe I was onto something there…

There is one exception there, though. Wieringo was a fan of Blacksad, as all right-thinking artists in the 2000s were. Check out this sketch:

Crazy small world: In his blog, Wieringo mentions a comment I made in response to another European character drawing of his, which lead him to post a Blacksad sketch there. I think this is that sketch. It doesn’t appear on the blog anymore, but I found this elsewhere on the net. I imagine it has to be the same one.

Mike Wieringo’s Spider-Man

I like Wieringo’s Spider-Man character a lot. He has the big McFarlane eyes, but taken up another 10% or so. These eyes threaten to take over his entire face, which gives him a bit of a bug-like appearance that feels right for a man with spider strengths.

His head has an interesting shape. It’s a little flat across the top and bulges in the upper half. It reminds me a bit of Chris Bachalo’s work.

We don’t see much of Peter Parker in this issue. When we do, though, he looks like an adult. When he dons his Spider-Man costume, though, he feels younger. It’s like Wieringo is channeling more of Ditko’s high school version of Spider-Man. The proportions Wieringo uses for Spider-Man give him many of the tweaks artists will often used to draw kids — a larger head that almost bobbles off his shoulders, along with bigger hands and feet and some lanky limbs.

Most importantly, Spider-Man never looks bored. I looked through all three issues and only saw a couple of panels where he’s standing up and just listening. There, though, his legs are spread shoulder width apart and a good angle makes him look a little more heroic than he might otherwise look in that moment. Other than that, you never see Spider-Man standing straight up and stock still. He’s not leaning up against a tree listening, maybe with a foot kicked up behind him.

No, this Spider-Man bounces across the page, and his knees are never straight out. Spider-Man spends a lot of time in the air with his bent legs and twisted body giving every scene as dynamic a moment as possible. There are moments where he appears frozen in mid-air in a cool pose, or bounding off a rogue Roxxon agent or a tree on the way to something else. He feels a little bit like an Art Adams drawing. I can see those proportions and some of those poses in here.

Mike Wieringo draws Spider-Man squinting an eye through his mask

There are also a couple examples of Spider-Man squinting through his mask. Ditko might have done that first, but I remember Erik Larsen using that in his earlier Amazing Spider-Man run.

That was the whole tone of the Dezago/Wieringo “The Sensational Spider-Man” run: classic fun superhero hijinks with some colorful villains. It was a good creative pairing. There is a trade paperback/digital edition collecting a “Volume 1” of the “Sensational Spider-Man by Todd Dezago and Mike Wieringo” —

— but there was never a Volume 2.

Things got a little dicey with lots of other artists handling issues in what would be that second volume, but I’d still like to have them all together. Someday…

The Continued Evolution of Wieringo’s Art

Here’s a sketch he did in 2006:

A 2006 Sketch of Ka-Zar and Spider-Man by Mike Wieringo

It’s a dramatic difference, even if you can tell it’s still from the same artist. This sketch feels a little more organic and a little less like the comic book formula Wieringo was using in the later 1990s. Spider-Man’s eyes shrunk a whole lot, too. It reminds me more of Terry and Rachel Dodson than Art Adams/Chris Bachaol.

I think “Tellos” is the turning point there. That work showed an evolution and maturation in Wieringo’s style that this Spider-Man work was just a bridge to from his earliest DC work.

Post-Script

I couldn’t help but think as I read these issues that Wieringo would have been a great fit as artist for the “Ka-Zar” series that Marvel was spinning up at about this same time. These issues show how well he can draw the animals and the landscapes, as well as Ka-Zar and Shanna themselves. Plus, that series was written by Mark Waid, who Wieringo had worked with already on “The Flash” and would return again to for “The Fantastic Four” some years later.

I don’t know if that was ever a possibility. I’m guessing he was already attached to this Spider-Man book, so it wasn’t going to happen, but I did laugh when I saw the ad for “Ka-Zar” #1 in the final issue of this storyline.

The timing was about right, after all.

I went back to TwoMorrow’s Modern Masters book featuring Mike Wieringo to see if there was anything in there about that. There was, but not in how you might be thinking!

No, “Ka-Zar” was never in the works for Wieringo, but a couple of other interesting Alternate Universes possbilities came out of the Dezago/Wieringo era on Spider-Man.

The series ended when there was a restart of the Spider-Man line. Then, Editor In Chief Bob Harras had the brilliant idea of using Todd Dezago and Mike Wieringo for “The Incredible Hulk”. The only problem was, this came on the heels of Harras telling Bobbie Chase to fire Peter David off his incredibly long run on the series. Harras wanted change. Chase did not.

It got to the point where Harras installed Dezago and Wieringo on the series before Chase had fired David. Needless to say, this was awkward, uncomfortable and — let’s be honest — unprofessional. Dezago and Chase didn’t see eye to eye. Dezago walked. Wieringo left with him. (History would repeat years later during the Fantastic Four debacle with Bill Jemas and Mark Waid.)

Weiringo would serve out the rest of his term of his Marvel exclusive contract (unhappily) doing not a heck of a lot, and then run to “Tellos.”

So, yeah, I thought this three-parter was a great audition for “Ka-Zar,” but it turns out to be a better audition for “The Incredible Hulk.”

One other tangent from that book: I don’t think Dezago is joking around when he says that the original plan was to pair Wieringo with Mark Waid on a Spider-Man book. Play that scenario out and “Tellos” never happens, which would have been a shame.

It’s an interesting alternate world where the Waid/Wieringo pairing moved from series to series together over the years.

I’m still happier that we got “Tellos.”

Looking at Spider-Man this year was a fun treat, too.