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Underrated Artists I Love #2: Herb Trimpe

This has been a long time coming, and, for me, an obvious choice! You can see #1 here.

Ah, Herb Trimpe. Some people actually don’t like Herb’s work—and some people dismiss him simply as a “Jack Kirby Clone”. These people are horribly & completely wrong. I found Herb in the mid-’70s, as a little kid, in UK reprints of his Hulk stories via the weekly Mighty World of Marvel. In spite of initially reading his last name as “tripe” (yeah, yeah, those people above would agree!) (I was just learning to read at the time), I immediately took to his work—and I’ve never changed my mind.

Incidentally: as any real fan knows, Herb’s last name rhymes with shrimpy.

If you’re with me thus far, I’ll assume you agree that Herb Trimpe was an awesome Hulk artist. Here’s Herb’s back cover for Marvel Treasury Edition #5 (1975), which is a fine example of how good a match H & H were…

Marvel Treasury Edition #5 back cover
Someone made him angry…

I still have vivid memories of seeing this book, bearing a striking front cover by John Romita of Hulk charging through a brick wall (see it here), displayed on a newsstand inside the Mander Centre in Wolverhampton, while out shopping with my Aunt Winnie sometime in ’76. The Hulk—the “sympathetic monster” version—had a lot of appeal to me as a Monster Kid and a huge King Kong fan. Anyhow, more about Herb…

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Ray Harryhausen

As mentioned here, finally the post about Ray Harryhausen—not before time, as his work loomed large in my childhood!

(I’m assuming everyone knows who Ray is, and what stop-motion animation is…)

Stop-motion is, of course, long since deprecated, especially since the wonders of CGI took over everything and made the world of cinema so much more entertaining and lovely. Maybe I’m being a little facetious. Maybe I just prefer the human touch and don’t feel shiny perfection is the be-all and end-all of everything. How old-fashioned!!

Ray, like everyone else who saw it as a kid, became absolutely obsessed with the original King Kong (1933) when he got to see it during its original run. The ground-breaking visuals in Kong (especially the stop-motion work) inspired Ray to pursue the field himself. Unlike everyone else, he actually got to meet FX pioneer Willis O’Brien, who became his mentor.

Kong was my absolute fave as a little kid (still is, really). Well, how could you not love this fella?

King Kong

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