This is one of my favorite covers. Not because of the artwork (which is fine), but because it was my dream come true from the time I was a kid growing up in San Diego in the 70's...

I remember seeing the below in bookstores all the time. Always wondered how many people actually tried it. Anybody here?

I didn’t use the book, but I was tempted by it many times in local bookstores. I drew like a fiend from before kindergarten – only-child syndrome, perhaps – and when that came out I was about 14 and had been doing ‘comic stuff’ for a little while, starting by copying, then doing my own stuff/characters and displaying it on the walls of our very generous and encouraging local comic shop and winning a couple of their comic art contests over the next few years. Pretty amateur stuff, though, but I did get better (subjectively speaking, of course) before setting it aside around 19 or so. Living in a small Canadian city, I assumed you had to be American and live in New York City to draw comics at all, so I stifled that idea and just kept plugging away for my own amusement knowing even then that a career in graphic design was where I was heading once I figured out how to get my foot in the door (turns out, by studying journalism - go figure). But the existence of that book and the amount of time it stayed in print made me (briefly) wonder if a big comics publisher would actually entertain the notion of considering submissions in that manner, which they probably never did anyway. And as I recall, the book had pre-drawn panels (I think?), and I preferred to make up my own to fit the images, do more splash pages, etc.

Mark Bagley.

I like the cartoony look of these:

I think Shooter was the editor in chief at the time (and wrote the "story" for this book) and he came from really humble beginnings, working in comics as a teenager, so I'm sure they were scouting talent any way they could. Unconventional panels and more splash pages were probably not as popular back then as they are now but you were a visionary!

Bagley won for Penciller and Doug Hazlewood won as Inker, and I imagine even back then they would've been hard to beat.

I never had that book (too expensive, though that's why it stayed around for a while) but I did have the book "How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way" which also stayed in publication a long while.

Good to know they actually played fair and treated it as a real audition, and not just some fun contest for the kiddies. Although reading Bagley’s bio it seems Marvel never bothered with him until he bugged Jim Shooter at a convention months after winning. Nice. The ‘comic stuff’ I was drawing when the book first came out was totally formulaic, in boring sequential boxes, and looked like the work of a 13 or 14 year old, and at that age I never would’ve submitted anything to anyone. It was just a hobby. But the very existence of a book like that, even though I never would’ve used it, was at least a small motivator to keep practicing. The last comic thing I did, about five years later, was certainly much improved, but by then I was pursuing a different career path. Kid stuff.

Also, working in comics – or fine arts in general – seemed like a very hand-to-mouth existence, especially with the over-saturation that really exploded into the 90’s. That’s when I tapped out altogether and haven’t looked back aside from acquiring omnibuses by the illustrators who inspired me. Even by the 80’s, though, plenty of artists were drawing outside the boxes or coming up with unique panel progressions, so I was just stealing my inspiration from actual visionaries, really. But I can understand Marvel’s approach with that book in testing to see if artists could work within pre-set confines, which is a talent in itself.

I remember seeing that Marvel Try-Out in a bookstore, but I was a young teen with not much money, I was really curious but didn't want to splurge on it (not sure the price in Canada, but it would have been more than $12.95, and that would buy me a lot of comics instead!). Shooter was indeed the EIC at the time, and this sounds like the kind of thing he would have come up with. I was writing and drawing my own attempts at comics back then, but never understood the Marvel Method. To me it seemed backwards to draw the comics and then script it after, I didn't get it and never did my comics that way.

Very Kirby-esque! I'm surprised I haven't seen these before since I was still heavily collecting in 2001, and FF was one of my main books. Huh!

I thought the FF covers were recent, I also seemed to have missed them because I was very much actively buying lots of Marvel comics in 2001 but must have missed this series. I do get a kick out of the covers.

I missed the 40th anniversary mention in the upper left corner, and the FF are very much a team that has now been around for 62, 63 years, impressive. The FF 1 comic came out about 10 years before I was born (born in 1971).

It's interesting to me that comic books were for a long time a very disposable medium... you drew what you drew but very rarely outside of covers or some really incredible panel or storyline would it ever come up again outside of whoever collected that issue. In many ways the proliferation of tpbs, omnibus's, collections, digital copies and the internet make preserving that art a lot easier but man there are so many comics that come out and so few people (relatively) read them, I wonder if there sometimes isn't a concept as an artist of doing like whole issues worth of work and just having it be almost completely forgotten. At least they get the art back these days (I think).

Cool, I've always been a big fan of L.B. Cole's cover art, and I don't recall seeing this particular cover by him before.

Hard to pick my favorite L.B. Cole cover, but I'll go with a classic:

I loved when DC did those various retro issues. I have a real fondness for the line art style comics had in the '70s through the late '80s. Modern coloring just doesn't always do it for me.

Now Only 12˘