Joe Giella

Joe Giella 2009

Joe Giella (born June 27, 1928 in Manhattan, New York City ) is an American comic artist .

Life

Giella attended Manhattan's School of Industrial Art, which he left early three months before graduation. At 17 he started working as a freelance pencil and ink draftsman for Hillman Periodicals. There he initially designed the humorous series Captain Codfish . At the same time he took seminars at the "Art Students League" and courses in commercial art at Hunter College.

In the later 1940s Giella worked as a freelance artist for the publishers Fawcett Comics and from 1946 Timely Comics, the predecessor of Marvel Comics . While inking the Captain Marvel series for Fawcett , while at Timely he assisted the illustrator Syd Shores in the design of the Captain America Comics series , for which he refined the background drawings and corrected occasional errors in the foreground drawings. He then carried out similar tasks for the series Human Torch , Sub Mariner and various humorists until he finally specialized in the tasks of an ink draftsman.

At the end of the 1940s, at the urging of his colleague and friend Frank Giacoia, Giella moved to DC Comics, a publisher that competed with Timely. For DC, Giella inked superhero series like The Flash , Green Lantern and Black Canary in the late 1940s .

In the early 1950s, he mainly ingested various western series such as Sierra Smith or Hopalong Cassidy - mostly drawn by Alex Toth and Gene Colan , while in the later 1950s science fiction subjects such as Adam Strange were the focus of his work. He also occasionally inked booklets from the Batman series , which was drawn at the time by artists such as Sheldon Moldoff and Carmine Infantino.

In the 1960s, Giella worked under the direction of Julius Schwartz together with the artist Gil Kane on the newly started series Green Lantern , which was completely redefined in terms of content and appearance , which became one of the most popular comic series of the 1960s, not least because of Giella's dynamic ink drawings.

In the 1970s and 1980s Giella worked on newspaper comic strips such as Flash Gordon (1970), The Phantom , and he increasingly devoted himself to commercial work as an advertising artist for agencies such as McCann Erickson and Saatchi & Saatchi. In the 1990s, he did again through his work on the newspaper comic strip Mary Worth .