Luis Dominguez

Swamp Thing #13 (Nov.-Dec., 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

As we covered in a post back in February, the 10th issue of DC Comics’ Swamp Thing marked the end of the award-winning collaboration on the title of writer Len Wein, artist Bernie Wrightson, and editor Joe Orlando, as Wrightson chose to leave the book after that installment.  But of course, that didn’t mean the end of Swamp Thing itself.

According to an interview with Orlando published in Amazing World of DC Comics #6 (May-Jun., 1975), among the artists who were considered to replace the muck-monster’s co-creator on the series were a young and mostly untried illustrator named Arthur Suydam, as well as the veteran Filipino artist Alex Niño.  In the end, however, it was another well-seasoned komiks creator from the Philippines, Nestor Redondo, who got the nod.  Read More

Dracula Lives #6 (May, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

In March, 1974, Marvel Comics’ black-and-white magazine Dracula Lives entered its second year of publication with a format relatively little changed from its first issue — meaning that it featured three all-new stories of the titular vampire (one set in the present, two set in the past), supplemented by illustrated text features and a reprint or two, all packaged behind a color painted cover.  (In this case, the cover was provided by Luis Dominguez, an Argentinian artist who’d been busy of late drawing covers [and occasional stories] for various DC Comics anthology titles; this was his third published cover for a Marvel horror magazine.)  Read More

Phantom Stranger #26 (Aug.-Sep., 1973)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Let’s start today’s post with a bit of gushing over Michael W. Kaluta’s incredible cover for its primary subject, OK?

Back around the first half of 1973, DC Comics editor Joe Orlando seemed to have settled on a preferred “house dress” for the titles in his charge that included a solid color banner that ran behind the title logo (as well as the DC emblem, price, etc.) and took up the top third of the cover area (more or less).  Not every single issue of every Orlando title during this period followed this design model (see Jim Aparo’s cover for Phantom Stranger #24 [Mar.-Apr., 1973] for one conspicuous outlier)… but most did.  And frankly, sometimes — maybe most times — you really wished he’d let his talented cover artists (a roster that, at the time, included Bernie Wrightson, Bob Oksner, Luis Dominguez, and Nick Cardy, in addition to Kaluta and others) have the entire area of the cover to work with, instead of limiting then to the bottom two thirds or so,  Read More