Sal Buscema

Sal Buscema (born Silvio Buscema,, on January 26, 1936) is an American comics artist, primarily for Marvel Comics, where he enjoyed a ten-year run as artist of The Incredible Hulk and an eight-year run as artist of The Spectacular Spider-Man.

He is the younger brother of comics artist John Buscema.

Born in Brooklyn, New York City, to Sicilian parents, Sal Buscema was the youngest of four siblings.

His elder brothers Alfred and John, a celebrated comic-book artist, and his Sister Carol predeceased him.

He got his start as a comic-book inker in the early 1950s when his brother agreed to let him ink comics pages; this led to Sal helping John by doing occasional background art on Dell Comics series John was drawing.

After high school, Buscema found work at "a small, two-man advertising art studio in Manhattan" but was fired after three months of doing mostly production work.

He went on to a larger commercial-art studio, where he was a gofer and a delivery person.

Like his brother John, Sal Buscema attended the High School of Music & Art, graduating in 1955.

He quit, then spent less than a year filling wedding-ring orders for the jewelry manufacturer J.R. Wood and Sons before being drafted into the peacetime U. S. Army in 1956.

Classified as an "illustrator", he served with the Army Corps of Engineers stationed at Fort Belvoir in Virginia.

He spent 21 months doing film strips and charts as training aids before being discharged after two years.

He attained the rank of specialist 3rd class, which he called "equivalent to corporal."

After briefly returning to New York City to assist at a one-man art studio, an Army connection found him work at the large Creative Arts Studio in Washington, D.C. There he did illustrations for government agencies, including the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Defense.

After living with his godparents for three months, Buscema and an Army buddy became roommates in Alexandria, Virginia.

In 1961, a call from his brother John brought Buscema to New York City to work with him at the advertising agency Alexander Chaite, Inc. After a year-and-a-half, John Buscema returned to the comic-book industry while Sal Buscema joined a friend and colleague from Creative Arts Studio, Mel Emde, who was opening his own company, Design Studio.

There Buscema stayed until 1968, when he began working for Marvel Comics, for which his brother was already established as a freelance artist.

Buscema by this time had spent "every night for about a year" teaching himself "how to produce a dynamic page" in the Marvel Comics storytelling style, enduring harsh critiques from his Marvel-artist brother John.

Brodsky had no assignments for him at the time, and Buscema "called him a couple of times just to bug him a little bit and let him know that I was still alive, and eventually the first job came through" in June 1968 — the 10-page Western feature "Gunhawk".

Buscema's first published comics work had come before that: inking John Buscema's pencil art on four 39- to 40-page stories in the superhero comic The Silver Surfer #4–7 (Feb.–Aug. 1969); and inking Larry Lieber's pencils on the regular-sized, 20-page Western The Rawhide Kid #68 (Feb. 1969).

John Buscema specifically asked for his brother as inker on The Silver Surfer, at the time a high-profile project dear to writer-editor Lee, who gave the character an unprecedented for the time double-sized, 64-page (with ads and covers) solo series priced at 25 cents, more than twice the price of the standard 32-page, 12-cent comic.

Sal Buscema recalled,

"Joe Sinnott inked the first three Silver Surfer [issues]. John was not happy with the inking Joe was doing on that. Joe is ... one of the greatest [inkers] of all time. But he did not ink John well ... because Joe's style of inking was somewhat overpowering, and at the end it ... didn't look like John Buscema anymore. John did not like that, because he was knocking himself out on this character, because this was a very important project that Stan had come up with. ... John told [Stan], 'I don't want Joe inking my work. He's losing my penciling.' ... Stan was very reluctant, but he said, 'Okay, who do you want?' He said, 'I want my brother,' and that's how I got it. ...[H]e knew that I knew how to ink his work. He was a little spotty on my first issue, but after that he was absolutely delighted with what I did."

Within a year, Buscema was penciling the superhero-team comic The Avengers, and for the next thirty years, he was one of the most prolific artists at the company.

Sal Buscema and writer Roy Thomas introduced the Squadron Sinister in The Avengers #69 (Oct. 1969) as a homage to the Justice League.

(Note that this version of the Guardians, created by Arnold Drake and Gene Colan in 1969, was a different team than that portrayed in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.) In 2010, Comics Bulletin ranked Buscema's collaboration with Gerber on The Defenders first on its list of the "Top 10 1970s Marvels".

That story, "The Coming of Gunhawk", by writer Jerry Siegel and penciler Werner Roth, was eventually published in the omnibus title Western Gunfighters #1 (cover-dated Aug. 1970).

The Thomas/Buscema team produced the last new story in The Uncanny X-Men before that series became all-reprints for several years, and created the super-villain Llyra in Sub-Mariner #32 (Dec. 1970).

Buscema drew an Avengers story plotted by science fiction writer Harlan Ellison, which featured the debut of Psyklop.

Writer Steve Englehart and Buscema launched The Defenders as an ongoing series in August 1972 and introduced Valkyrie to the team in issue #4 (Feb. 1973).

Buscema also worked with Englehart on Captain America; their 1972–1975 run on that title saw it become one of Marvel's top-sellers.

The pair teamed on several issues of The Avengers as well and Englehart has described Buscema as being one of his "all-time favorites" and "a perfect comic book storyteller."

With Steve Gerber, a successor writer, Buscema co-created Starhawk, adding the character to the roster of the future-based super-team, The Guardians of the Galaxy.

Their father, who was born in Italy and died in 1973, was a barber.

Buscema grew up a fan of Hal Foster's Prince Valiant comic strip, of George Tuska's comic-book art, and of commercial illustrators such has Robert Fawcett, Al Parker, and Norman Rockwell, and called his artist brother John "greatly responsible for me pursuing drawing. ... John was definitely an inspiration".

With writer Bill Mantlo, Buscema created the supporting character Jean DeWolff in Marvel Team-Up #48 (Aug. 1976).

Mantlo, a frequent collaborator, later said that Buscema was a formative influence on his plotting.

As Buscema recalled in the late 2000s:"Once I got the hang of it I made up ... six sample pages of pencils [i.e. penciled, uninked art pages], which I regret, because I wanted to be an inker. I didn't want to pencil. My first few jobs for Marvel were inking jobs, but I did those while working for Design Center. I wanted to work full-time for Marvel, so it was out of necessity that I penciled. [Editor-in-chief Stan Lee] loved [the samples]. He asked me to come on up to New York, which I did, and I went through the most fantastic interview of my life. Stan was leaping on his chair and his desk, just to relate to me physically what he wanted on a comic-book page. It was fascinating and it was charming all at the same time. He made the sound effects, the whole nine yards. ... He demonstrated every other way you could possibly demonstrate what he wanted on those pages—the dynamics and so on."

The interview had come about after Buscema, at his brother's urging, had first written to Marvel production manager Sol Brodsky to introduce himself and his work.

He recalled in the late 2000s, "At first I was very slow. If I knocked out six or eight pages a week I was happy. Then I started getting a little bit better, and I could probably do a couple of pages a day. But once I hit that five-year transitional period, I was like a machine. I could grind the stuff out. ... Everything just fell into place, and all of a sudden I found it very easy to do."

"I think they just said, 'Sal, here's the plot, go to it'" Buscema recalled in 2003.