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Tripwire’s 101 Greatest Comic Artists Of All Time: No.85: Ross Andru

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5 years ago

August 12, 2021

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No.85: Ross Andru

Ross Andru’s long and distinguished career was one of sturdy professionalism – not regarded as a breakout artist by fandom, he was nevertheless an artist who could create mood and subtlety in the medium. After studying comic art and cartooning under Burne Hogarth, Andru quickly teamed up with longtime partner and collaborator Mike Esposito in the late 1940s, first on minor publishers Hillman and Standard, and then in 1953 DC Words: Andrew Colman…

Working with scripter Robert Kanigher, Andru and Esposito produced hundreds of stories for DC’s Big Five war titles, before moving on to Wonder Woman in 1958, modernising the character in the process, and in 1962, the humorous title Metal Men, a robot super-team. Andru was prolific at DC in the 1960s, honing his classicist art on oddities such as Rip Hunter and the Suicide Squad, as well as the decidedly strange “soldiers versus dinosaurs” run on Star-Spangled War Stories, before he took over the pencilling reins on The Flash.

Andru reached his zenith when he made the switch to Marvel in 1971. After a brief stint on Marvel Feature, which introduced the Defenders, he began illustrating Spider-Man on Marvel Team-Up the following year before beginning his five year run on Amazing Spider-Man, working with scripter Gerry Conway. His art throughout his tenure, which began not long after Conway had killed off Gwen Stacy and Norman Osborn, was superlative – as Conway averred, his storytelling was fluid and cinematic, underpinned by his attention to detail and research. More significantly, his art exuded a more sinister, darker tone for the title, as Peter Parker went through one of his worst periods. If anything, Andru’s work here was noirish – the long-running Jackal saga evoking menace, intrigue and psychosis. It also contained the origin of a certain anti-hero and Spidey antagonist, the uncompromisingly brutal Punisher, co-created by Andru.

Perhaps his best work was the landmark Marvel and DC co-production, Superman vs The Amazing Spider-Man – fans compared his art on this treasury-sized spectacular to Neal Adams, and it was a virtuoso effort. Overall, Andru, who continued to draw at DC for another decade after this milestone was, despite being a veteran by then, one of the key artists of the Bronze Age.