Masters of the Double Splash

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The double splash page is a comic fan’s treat. The artist gets to spread their wings and really show off their talent, which is usually squished into little boxes. Splash pages, of one page, are nice, but a double splash is just that much better. This post will look at some of my favorites. I can’t claim to any great amount of research on this topic. I thought of the pages that stuck in my mind and went there.

I’m not sure who invented the double splash page. The earliest example I could find was Jack Kirby in 1941. There is a good chance it was Jack. He was an innovator and gave us so much of what comics do. He used the double splash frequently as the decades went on. His later SF-oriented stuff at and after DC had a double splash in every comic. He must have enjoyed drawing those vast landscapes.

The next example I found was Joe Kubert in his Tor comics of 1954. Joe makes a bit a joke calling it “Panelrama” in honor of the film screen formats like Cinemascope. The movie promised wide screen eye-popping images. So did Joe. Kubert would use the double splash for his Tarzan comics at DC in the 1970s. Other artists like Franc Reyes imitated Kubert’s format.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Warren Publications gave us the black & white wonders of Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella (as well as other magazines). Tom Sutton used the double splash for some great openers. Later for Marvel, he drew what is without doubt the best part of their Planet of the Apes line, “The Future Chronicles”.

Some others at Warren included Esteban Maroto, Alfred Alcala and Gonzalo Mayo.

Mike Grell gave us the The Warlord in 1976. The adventures of Travis Morgan inside the Earth are filled with danger. Each issue of that comic featured an exciting double splash to get things going.

In England, the black & white weekly comic 2000 A. D. did not use splash pages in the same way. Knowing the center of the magazine would offer two pages side-by-side, the publisher used the centerfold as a color double splash page, dedicating this to the classic Space Opera hero, Dan Dare.

Marvel Comics embraced the double splash and used it to great effect in their Sword & Sorcery comics. Jess Jodloman used it well in Kull and the Barbarian#2. Barry Windsor-Smith played with it in Conan the Barbarian #16, “The Frost Giant’s Daughter” but really hit it out of the park with “The Worms of the Earth’ for Savage Sword of Conan #16-17.

The award for most fantastical double splash pages has to go to Alex Nino. Especially for the black & white stuff he did in Warren’s 1984-1994 comic (He had done some earlier in Eerie and Harlan Ellison’s “Repent Harlequin, Said the Ticktock Man” (Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction #3) for Marvel.) Alex boggles the mind and feast the eyes with his complex and disorienting pages.

Conclusion

The Double Splash page didn’t disappeared after 1985. Comics in the 1990s and later had their fair share. I know I have left out some important players here too. The Japanese comics may have had an important influence. European comics also played by their own rules. I can remember some pretty good double pieces by Druillet in the early Heavy Metals. (Those should be here.) Perhaps next time…

The advent of digital and Internet comics has made this treat less likely though. Computer screen present one image at a time, so the two-page format is kinda lost. I know when I am reading older comics on my phone a double page is more of an annoyance than a treat. But fear not as this wonderful Tom Grindberg art shows. An artist will always find a way.