Dan Spiegle
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| Dan Spiegle | |
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| Born | October 12, 1920 |
| Area(s) | Penciller, Inker |
Dan Spiegle (born October 12, 1920) is a comic book and cartoon artist and illustrator (penciller and inker).
[edit] Life and career
He began his professional cartoonist career in 1949 drawing Hopalong Cassidy for the Mirror Syndicate. He continued to draw this strip after it was bought out by King Features in 1951, until it was canceled.
He then moved to Western Publishing Company drawing various comics for the Gold Key Comics line. This included the comic Space Family Robinson, Korak, Brothers of the Spear, and many of their mystery/occult titles, as well as titles based on television series such as Maverick; Spiegle began work on Maverick comics before any publicity photographs of series star James Garner were available, so he met the actor on the set and the resultant drawings of Garner in the subsequent comics are eerily exact. Spiegle explained in an interview linked to below: "I would say my favorite was Maverick, which ran about three years----fairly successful, considering the run of other western strips published then. I was assigned this strip even before they had stills available for the show, so I was sent down to Warner Bros. to see it in production----where I met James Garner, which is perhaps the reason I enjoyed it so much. Having met the star, I was extra careful to make the drawings I did look as parallel to the real person as possible. I put my all into that strip, having fun all the way."
While mostly known for his realistic style he also proved capable of handling more cartoony material such as Scooby Doo. In 1966 at the height of the James Bond craze Spiegle provided realistic backgrounds and human characters while funny animal artist Paul Murry drew Mickey and Goofy for the short-lived Mickey Mouse Super Secret Agent. As comic book historian Scott Shaw! notes "What’s even weirder about these stories is that in them, none of the “real” human characters seem to notice anything remotely unusual about occupying space with a three-foot-tall talking cartoon mouse!"
Spiegle later moved to DC Comics and worked on many of their features such as Batman, Unknown Soldier, Blackhawk, Tomahawk, Jonah Hex and Teen Titans until the early 1990s. His most notable work was the Nemesis backup series in Brave and the Bold, and on Blackhawk with Mark Evanier.
He would co-create Crossfire with Mark Evanier at Eclipse Comics. Evanier and Spiegle also did five issues of Hollywood Superstars for Marvel's Epic Comics imprint. Both series had as their milieu the entertainment industry and drew on Evanier's years working as writer for television and films.
More recently he provided the art for Indiana Jones: Thunder in the Orient (1993-1994) and Indiana Jones and the Spear of Destiny (1995) published by Dark Horse Comics. He is also credited with doing the artwork for Nintendo Power magazine's Nester's Adventures comic (formerly Howard & Nester) in its later stages until it was discontinued in 1993. In the mid-1990s he took over doing art for the short-lived revival of the comic strip Terry and the Pirates after Tim and Greg Hildebrandt left. He is currently providing comic-style stories for Boys' Life magazine and has most recently teamed up with Evanier again for a new Crossfire story.
