Interesting account of Colletta's entire career, beginning on romance comics of the 1950's, Colletta's transition from being a penciller/inker, into becoming exclusively an inker. And the period he was inking Kirby's art. Colletta primarily inked Kirby on JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY/THOR 106-177 and 179 (less a few fill-in issues by Frank Giacoia or Bill Everett), from roughly 1964-1970. Their longest run together. I agree, I thought Colletta brought a nice visual style to Kirby's THOR run, but it's undeniable that he erased art and turned huge areas into silhouette, to cut corners and do the inking fast. How Colletta actually erased pencils, and turned huge areas of background art into blacked-out silhouette. I know Mark Evanier has railed for years in print and online about how awful Colletta was to Kirby's art, and it's revealed here how Evanier was instrumental as Kirby's assistant at DC in 1971 in having Colletta removed as inker on Kirby's Fourth World books.
After, Colletta became art director in the 1970's at DC, and hired a lot of great talent like Marshall Rogers, Michael Golden and Frank Miller. And I was a huge fan of Mike Grell's THE WARLORD for its entire 50 issue run. Grell pencilled and inked the first 14 issues, Rubinstein inked issue 15, and from 16-50 Colletta inked every issue except for 41, 43, and 45-47. This explains what I didn't previously know, that Grell hated Colletta's inks on his work, and wanted him off the book. When he went back to Marvel and got work due to his friendship and loyalty to Shooter, and with Shooter's firing got the axe as well, he wrote a vitriolic letter to Marvel's editors, that was hilariously played out in a dramatic reading here, by someone in a British accent, to class it up and add to the drama of it. Hilarious!
Much of this about Colletta I knew to some degree, a lot of it I learned many details here for the first time. It was rumored for years that Colletta had shady dealings with organized crime, and it's revealed here that his father was believed to be a mafia figure, who fled from Sicily to the U.S., before also bringing in his wife and children. Not mentioned here, Neal Adams (n BRAVE AND THE BOLD 81) and John Byrne (in SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN 58) each had one story inked by Colletta, and were furious about it, and each gave orders that Colletta never be permitted to ink their work again. In Adams' case, after Colletta inked it and Adams saw what was done, Adams completely re-inked away as much of Colletta's work as he could on the pages before they were sent to the printers.
I also love the story about how Stan Lee ran several pages of photos of everyone working in the Marvel bullpen staff (MARVEL TALES ANNUAL 1, Sept 1964) and parents wrote in and complained because they thought Vince Colletta looked like a mobster. Shooter ribbed Colletta about it in a Bullpen Bulletins interview in the page that ran in May 1983 issues. Also undisclosed in the video, apparently it was a great trauma for Colletta to be fired from Marvel, he died only a year or two after his departure. For all his cutting corners, he apparently gained a lot of fulfillment and identity from his work, and having his career ended so crushingly really took a toll on him. I'd agree with Colletta that after Shooter was fired from Marvel, the work quality there sunk down to hack garbage for many years.
