The great Stan Goldberg passed away last night.
There are basically two major areas of comic book history where Stan Goldberg's name will be forever linked. One, he was the main colorist for Marvel in the early days of the Marvel Age. Two, after Dan DeCarlo left Marvel Comics in the 1950s, Stan Goldberg took over most of DeCarlo's humor titles at Marvel. It was here that Goldberg began drawing in the famed DeCarlo style (which is now known as the Archie house style). Goldberg then followed DeCarlo to Archie. Among the many strong artists of that era who drew in DeCarlo's style, I feel that Goldberg was the best of the bunch. DeCarlo is DeCarlo, of course, one of the greatest comic book artists of all-time, but Goldberg was excellent in his own right. He had a strong sense of storytelling (which was very important in the Archie Sunday comic strip that he drew for years) and always had a knack for bold figure work that really drew you in as a reader. Goldberg drew the Archie sequences in the classic Archie Meets Punisher comic. After DeCarlo stopped drawing for Archie, Goldberg was the main artist on the flagship Archie comic title throughout most of the 1990s and well into the 2000s, ending his tenure with the famous recent storyline where Archie marries Veronica and Betty in two alternate futures.
My condolences to his friends and family.
Read on for a classic Goldberg story from 1996...
It's weird. It's actually been roughly FIVE years since Goldberg has been working at Archie, but I still feel weird knowing that when I next read a new Archie comic that it definitely won't carry the work of one of their all-time greatest artists. Luckily, with Archie's reprint system, new readers will be enjoying Goldberg's work for years to come (just like DeCarlo has been undoubtedly gaining new fans with all of Archie's reprints of HIS work over the years). Plus, IDW recently released a volume of the Best of Stan Goldberg as part of their stunning Archie art series (their DeCarlo stuff is amazing). IDW does such great work for comic fans.