Well, this is weird. Vince Colletta, the late, controversial, inker who collaborated with Jack Kirby on a number of books, apparently wrote an angry letter to Marvel editors sometime in 1987, following former editor-in-chief Jim Shooter’s dismissal. 23 years later, it’s the daily featured missive on correspondence compilation site Letters of Note. And Colletta seemed just a mite bit perturbed about how things turned out.
The letter starts: “Marvel Editors…you are the droppings of the creative world. You were destined to float in the cesspool till urine logged and finally sink to the bottom with the rest of the shit but along came Jim Shooter who rolled up his sleeves and rescued you.” It may not seem all that shocking now, given how this type of vitriol is pumped out online quicker than the BP oil leak, but the fact that Colletta actually wrote the letter out by hand (in cursive, even, you can view the original letter here, where it surfaced online three years ago) puts a bizarre, yet somehow quaint, spin on things.
Colletta also apparently had a unique flair for rather graphic descriptions: “Ripping away his flesh from his body and laughing and pounding your chest like conquering ghouls and long after his bones were dry you continued to pour salt on them to squeeze every ounce of pain out of him.”
In entirely unrelated news, Shooter talked to Newsarama last week about Dark Horse’s new Doctor Solar, Man of the Atom series.
June 30th, 2010 at 12:48 am
maybe Vince Colletta just make a joke with the editor not an angry letter.
June 30th, 2010 at 2:09 am
BATTERY:
Noooo, if you actually read the article that came from you’d see Vinnie was VERY pissed.
June 30th, 2010 at 12:26 pm
Looks like Vince Colletta was as good a writer as he was an artist.
June 30th, 2010 at 6:13 pm
Good one, Eddie! Vince Colletta never met a a comic book artist whose pencils he couldn’t ruin with his dull, greasy inks. Of course he defended Shooter, if it wasn’t for him, Colletta would not have worked in the 80s.
July 1st, 2010 at 11:17 am
Why would someone characterize Colletta’s inking as “greasy?” Was that supposed to be an Italian reference? Nice try, James. Vince had more of a thin, scratchy line as his style. Now Joe Sinnott’s inks were greasy but I don’t mean that in a bad way.
I liked Vinnie’s letter a lot. Wish I had that type of courage. And as to what you wrote about Colletta not getting work, what a foolish thing to write. Vince was the only inker, and I mean the ONLY one who could be counted on to get work done on time.