Sal Buscema, a classic Marvel artist whose work spanned decades for the publisher, passed away Jan. 23 at the age of 89, just a few days shy of his 90th birthday.
Buscema pencilled and inked a number of comics for Marvel throughout the years, including Avengers, Fantastic Four, Thor, Marvel Team-Up, Sub-Mariner, Daredevil, Nova, Eternals, Marvel Two-In-One, New Mutants, Iron Man, Ghost Rider, Ms. Marvel, Howard The Duck, Master Of Kung Fu, and three major Spider-Man series — Amazing, Web of and Peter Parker, Spectacular Spider-Man. He pencilled key runs on Captain America, ROM: Spaceknight and The Defenders, and a 10-year run on Incredible Hulk.
His death was reported by artist Sterling Clark on Facebook, who worked with Buscema on a project. “When I think back on my childhood and all of the comic books that I read, Sal’s name seems to have appeared in just about all of them,” Clark said. “I didn’t just read the books that he illustrated, I studied them. Every nuance in his pencils and his inks I saw and tried to mimic. He was definitely one of the greats during those years at Marvel, when handling more than three titles a month was not just a requirement but a necessity.”
Buscema was born in 1936 in New York City, the youngest of four siblings, one of whom, John, would also go on to become a legendary artist for Marvel and, in fact, helped bring Sal into the world of comics. Both of them attended New York’s High School of Music & Art, and while in high school, Sal would ink John’s pencils when John began working for Dell Comics.
“Of course I worked with John on comics before I got into them myself,” he told Nerd Team 30. “He was working for Dell Publishing at the time and occasionally when he got into deadline problems I would work with him doing backgrounds, inking them and that kind of thing in order to help him out.”
After graduation, Buscema worked in advertising before being drafted into the military, where he served in the Army Corps of Engineers as an illustrator, drawing training aids until he was discharged. Afterwards, he found a job drawing illustrations for government agencies, including the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Defense, in Washington D.C., but his brother John would eventually lure him back to New York and a career in comics.
Buscema’s first published work for Marvel was Silver Surfer #4, published in 1968, where he inked his brother’s pencils. He wanted to pencil comics, though, and by 1970 he had become the artist for Avengers. Buscema worked with Roy Thomas on the title, who he also teamed up with on some of the final stories starring the original X-Men, before the team was rebooted with issue #94. In 1972, he teamed up with Steve Englehart to launch the Defenders, and together the two of them would create an influential run on Captain America — the Secret Empire saga, which saw the hero battling the U.S. government and taking on the identity of Nomad.
“At one point for Marvel and I was penciling and inking two books a month,” he told Nerd Team 30. “That was a real boon to me because the way we worked back then, rather than the computer driven world of comics today, I would pencil the book, or rather do breakdowns and then the dialogue would be written and the lettering would be done and then it would come back to me for inking. Then it was a matter of doing the finish work with the ink.”
In 1976, Buscema and writer Gerry Conway launched Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man, a third Spider-Man book alongside the flagship Amazing Spider-Man and Marvel Team-Up. The comic was intended to focus more on Peter Parker’s social life and supporting cast. Buscema would draw the title until 1978, but would return to it later in his career and become the series’ artist from 1988 until 1996, drawing some of the title’s best stories when they were written by J.M. DeMatteis.
“Working with Sal for two years on Spectacular Spider-Man remains a highlight of my career,” DeMatteis said on BlueSky. “And the best part? He’s not just a great artist, he’s a truly good guy.”
Another title that Buscema elevated was Rom: Spaceknight, a title he launched with writer Bill Mantlo, who Buscema also worked with extensively on The Incredible Hulk. Rom was a toy tie-in with not much history to go on, but Mantlo and Buscema gave him a compelling, tragic back story, of an alien cyborg encased in armor so he could battle his planet’s archenemies, the Dire Wraiths. Although it was a licensed title, Rom was set in he Marvel Universe, giving him the chance to interact with the X-Men, Galactus and other Marvel characters.
Buscema may have followed in his brother’s footsteps into the world of comics, but he set his own path as an artist. John Buscema was the consummate draftsman, but Sal Buscema brought a kinetic energy to his drawings. You can see it in these covers for one of the later updates to the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe. Even the stationary figures looked like they were ready to punch someone:
… which is maybe why it’s appropriate that he became known for the “Buscema Punch” while working on Incredible Hulk:
He was also an ace at storytelling and panel design, which really shined during his Spectacular Spider-Man days:
“RIP Sal Buscema, there was no one like him, a pro’s pro,” John Allison wrote on BlueSky. “I still think about his Pro File all the time. Drew 13 pages in one day, but at the end of the day, he couldn’t see! It has always helped put my difficult work days into perspective.”
In addition to Spectacular Spider-Man, Buscema spent the 1980s working on titles like New Mutants and Thor, becoming the artist for Walt Simonson near the end of his legendary run. He would also return to inking his brother on Fantastic Four. After finishing his eight-year run on Spectacular, he left Marvel briefly in the late 1990s to work for DC, working on stories featuring Batman, Superman, Superboy and more, before returning to Marvel.
In the 2000s, after “retiring,” he became the long-running inker on Spider-Girl, for artists Pat Olliffe and Ron Frenz. He would ink the character across several relaunches, until 2010. Even into his 70s and 80s, he still did work for Marvel, DC, IDW and independent projects like Heroes Union and The R.I.G.H.T. Project.
“The toughest penciler to ink for me would probably be me, when I would ink my own work,” Buscema told SYFY late in his career. “I think that would be a legitimate answer because I’m never satisfied with what I do. Whenever I penciled a book, I was always looking for ways to make it better. So I would do that with the brush. I should say I use a brush better than I use a pencil. For some reason, I’ve always been adaptable to the brush. I love the flexibility of the instrument. It’s just a lot of fun being able to ink over a… especially a really good penciller. But also, when I had to ink pencils that were sort of borderline, I would very subtly without being nasty about it, and trying to be as true to the pencils as I could be. I would also try to make improvements. But when you’re inking a Ron Frenz, a John Buscema, or a John Romita, you stay as true to their pencils as you possibly can.”
We share our condolences and in the grief of Sal Buscema’s friends, family and fans, as the industry has lost a true legend.