In honour of this months "The Strange Adventures Of H P Lovecraft" from Image.
Around twenty years ago I bought the above G.I.Joe comic when it was seriealised in the the back of Transformers weekly. It was hands down the ugliest comic I'd seen at that point. Unbelieveable. Off model, ugly girls and a pretty good story which always makes bad art feel worse (imagine if it was drawn by Ron Randall!!?!?!?!).
I was also disappointed when Mignola drew X-Force 8. Were I a little older I probably would have hated Bill Sienkiewicz on New Mutants.
A few years later when I realised that people like Kevin Nowlan, Bret Blevins, Mike Mignola, Klaus Janson were great and had all kicked off their careers working at Marvel under Jim Shooter I ended up digging through titles like Marvel Fanfare, Marvel Premier etc which you could always find cheap.
I came across this great Hulk story in Marvel Fanfare. Kirby lines with Frazetta ballet, strange colours but really a lovely little strip.
He did a five issue mini called Dakota North which was fine but I came to realise that he'd done very little over the years.
James Robinson and Archie Goodwin until recently had managed to get the most work out of him between the almost four issues of the EXcellent Vigilante mini (with Mark Chiarello on colours, also recently collected by DC after more than a decade) and a stand-alone issue of Batman: Legends Of The Dark Knight. He had worked on Bruce Timm's Batman Adventures so has been busy and when you follow his super fluid storytelling you understand why.
According to an article I read with/by Toby Cypress, Salmons has burnt a lot of bridges over the years and many won't work him which is a sin. Below are first a Thor/Iron image which shows what we might have had if his early Avengers series had come off. Following that is a story from Penthouse Comics (the only two I own, I hasten to add...). Ninteen pages in a smutty comic so I guess not too many have seen it. Enjoy and check out the Lovecraft book at 160 pages, first issue free here
In my opinion, the Tony Salmons books worth tracking down are:
Dakota North 1-5 though not a great read!
Doctor Strange 2nd Series 64
GI Joe 69
GI Joe Yearbook 3 from 1986 or thereabouts
Captain America Red White and Blue
Adventures Of Lovecraft
Vigilante Miniseries 1-4
Legends Of the Dark Knight 85
Batman Gotham Knights 4 (Batman B&W collected in Batman B&W Vol 2
There's also a characteristically unfinished website
http://www.tonysalmons.net/
