Sword & Sorcery on a Post-Apocalyptic Earth: Blackmark by Gil Kane
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Blackmark by Archie Goodwin and Gil Kane (Bantam Books, January 1971). Cover by Gil Kane
As I’ve mentioned before, I didn’t grow up with comics. They weren’t available in my small, rural town of Charleston, Arkansas in the 1960s and 70s. The first store to carry them appeared around ’74 and had a small spinner rack with a dozen or so titles. By then I was already reading regular books and the comics, while they had interesting art, had much less story than books. I bought a few but never got hooked and knew virtually nothing about any comics creator.
As an adult in my fifties, I watched a movie called The Watchmen, which was very good, and I bought the original graphic novel by Alan Moore. I was blown away by the complex storytelling and started buying other graphic novels. I finally started to learn about some of the great comic book creators over the years. I still don’t consider myself a comic book reader but I keep an eye out for items that might interest me. That’s how, in 2019, I found a cool little book called Blackmark, “by Gil Kane.”
Gil Kane (1926 – 2000) was born in Latvia as Eli Katz but immigrated with his family to the US at about 3. He lived in Brooklyn and started working in comics at an early age. By 16, he’d found full-time employment and quit high school.
He’s best known for helping create Green Lantern and Iron Fist, none of which I’ve ever read. In 1971, working with a scripter named Archie Goodwin, he created Blackmark (from Bantam), one of the earliest graphic novels. It’s set on a post-apocalyptic Earth and is more sword & sorcery than sword & planet, but it has that exotic S&P feel I crave.
From what I understand, Kane created the setting and characters and did all the art. He provided an outline for the script to Goodwin, who then did the writing. Each page has an illustration or two with squares of story around them. There’s a lot of story, which I appreciated.
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Interiors from the Marvel Preview #17. Art by Gil Kane
The art is great but the script is just wonderful. It’s way over the top sword and sorcery prose and I enjoyed it tremendously. Here’s a taste:
Blackmark awoke to shrill, inhuman cries. Dawn had brought new horror on flapping wings.
I highly recommend Blackmark to readers of S&P fiction.
Charles Gramlich administers The Swords & Planet League group on Facebook, where this post first appeared. His last article for Black Gate was The Sword & Planet Tales of Ralph Milne Farley.
I haven’t read Blackmark, but Kane was a superb artist. Goodwin was probably the best writer of his era. Yes, better then bigger names like Stan Lee. Goodwin wrote one of the best war comics, Blazing Combat.
I definitely love this art. I’ll have to check out Blazing Combat
Gil Kane sold the rights to Blackmark and then took years trying to buy them back, which he eventually did. My edition is a 2002 reprint but before this, the story was reprinted in four parts in Marvel’s b/w The Savage Sword Of Conan #1-4 in 1974-75. Kane took one of the DC characters he’s most connected with, The Atom, into sword and sorcery territory with a 4-issue Miniseries and 3 Specials in the mid-80s.
Archie Goodwin was a superb writer whose career began with Warren’s b/w magazines in the 60s such as Eerie and Creepy; he later moved to Marvel and eventually became a Senior Editor there.
Blazing Combat has been collected into a trade paperback – there were only four issues of the magazine, it was cancelled because its stories were considered “too realistic” (whatever that means) for its Vietnam War-era readers.
I have a copy of Showcase Presents: The Atom which has that characters first appearances. It has a piece by Kane (one by Gardner Fox too) on his influences. Kane mentions Robert E. Howard as one. I’m pretty sure this was before the Howard Boom.
I’ve got a lot of Fox books too and didn’t know until about 10 years ago that he’d also written a lot of comic stuff. He was prolific.
I’m a story guy so even though I liked the art in Black Mark, it was the words that most caught me. I don’t think I”d read any Goodwin before but I’ll be looking for him. I”m going to look to pick up blazing combat today. Cool that it’s been collected.
There is a 30th anniversary edition of Gil Kane’s complete Blackmark in trade paperback which is somewhere buried in many boxes of books crying for me to buy and put together a bookcase for them.
I’ve heard about that but haven’t ever looked into getting it
Does anyone remember the cartoon called Blackstar? It looked an aweful lot like this.
I don’t remember ever seeing such a cartoon. I’ve seen the phrase Blackstar used in other places. Not sure where though.
In a few interviews Kane claims the credit for bringing CONAN to the comics, in that he brought the property to Lee and Thomas’s attention with the idea that he would draw it but somehow that lost in the shuffle of actually getting the comic out.
I’ve heard that but never looked into the truth of it.