Can You Name This Classic Superman Artist?

Earlier this week on Facebook, longtime Superman: The Man of Steel artist Jon Bogdanove presented fans with a challenge: Can you name the classic Superman artist who pencilled and inked the image above?With the Wayne Boring ears, the curt Swan body, John Byrne’s emblem and the wrists and ankles of a Golden Age creator like Joe Shuster, the enigmatic image of the Last Son of Krypton drew a couple of dozen responses with answers that included Al Plastino and Dick Sprang, before Bogdanove finally revealed himself.Literally, himself.

I’m very fond of the first generation of comic book creators and the histories of these characters and I’ve done quite a bit of work–a lot of people know the story that I drew in Man of Steel where I drew like Joe Shuster and there are similar instances where I’ve drawn in an old-fashioned style. Or, I’ve worked with DC licensing imitating the styles of dead artists whenever they needed a Golden or Silver Age reproduction. I take that sense of stewardship very seriously, so the contributions and creations and inventions of that first generation of comics artists and writers is so rich and I think it is possible that there’s some baby being thrown out with the bathwater when the companies rush to diminish and ignore and overwrite all of that history.I started out doing their period work. I think I started with them because they saw the Hero Illustrated poster insert I did for Zero Hour and so I started getting work–some very strange jobs but a lot of Golden and Silver Age reproductions. And it sort of graduated from that into doing the contemporary stuff where I started to imitate Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez. He’s actually harder to imitate than Joe Shuster, because he draws so damn well, and that gradually changed as things changed at DC licensing to be less an imitation of Garcia Lopez and more just sort of a DC house style.My DC house style stuff, I did a lot of Batman style guides in the mid-aughts and some Green Lantern stuff around the time of the movie and some Justice League stuff that shows up on toys at Target all the time. I did a lot of that stuff and as it went on, I think probably more of my tells started to show through but even so I found it interesting, challenging and educational to suppress my Bog-ness for a while and to try and concentrate on sort of a universal brand style. It’s oddly like doing portraits except instead of drawing a face of a person sitting in front of you, you’re trying to internalize the thought processes of other artists and that was for me I think a very useful exercise.