RIP: Roy Lichtenstein Influence Jerry Grandenetti - Jerry Grandenetti, p.2

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Features

Published on Friday, 01 October 2010 05:32

Written by Frank Lovece

Comics writer, historian and author Mark Evanier called Grandenetti "one of the great individual stylists of comic books in the fifties and sixties…. As the [1960s] decade wore on, he got away from combat art and conventional page layouts, taking what he'd learned from Eisner and applying it in new, then-revolutionary directions." In 1966, those directions led to the black-and-white horror-comics magazines of Warren Publishing, where, Evanier says, "Grandenetti really won me over [with] a series of stories, mostly involving haunted houses, for Creepy and Eerie.

"Editor-writer Archie Goodwin," he continued, "thought Grandenetti drew the most atmospheric old mansions so he tailored his scripts in that direction and encouraged the artist to forget everything he'd been told by editors about what comics had to be. He did. The result was some of the most visually arresting and controversial comic art of the period."

In this period, Grandenetti told Stroud, "I began to realize what I liked was the free rein [publisher James Warren] gave all artists, and that was when I really began to enjoy the comic book work that I was doing…. As I began to experiment I began to do some of my best stuff." Comics historian Don Mangus concurs, writing, "Perhaps it was the subject matter or the fluid nature of the wash medium but whatever the case, he produced brilliant work at Warren in the late 1960s and early 1970s."

Grandenetti did do some superhero and adventure-fiction work, drawing the titular supernatural spirit of vengeance in 1960s issues of The Spectre, and co-creating the sword and sorcery character Nightmaster in Showcase #82 (May 1969). He penciled a Sub-Mariner story -- inked by the character's Golden Age creator, Bill Everett -- in Marvel Comics' Tales to Astonish #86 (Dec. 1966). And among other work, he collaborated with Joe Simon -- who decades before had co-created Captain America with the great Jack Kirby -- to whip up the four-issue Prez (Sept. 1973-March 1974) and, in 1975, a long-forgotten one-off feature called "The Green Team: Boy Millionaires."

Ironically, even as he continued freelancing in comics through at least 1984, Grandenetti always kept his sights on being a glossy-magazine illustrator, like in the 1950s heyday of artists like Coby Whitmore and Albert Dorne. "As long as I was able to get assignments and pay my bills and maybe someday break into magazine illustration, I was happy," he told Stroud. "And the closer I got to getting into magazine illustration that industry began to disappear. … I did some illustration for Argosy and a couple of men's magazines, but [illustration in] things like the Ladies Home Journal, the serious woman's magazines that had some great illustrators, was beginning to diminish and it was gone by the time I was even close to it."

He told Arndt that, "Around 1990, I took a staff job with Young & Rubicam as the art director/illustrator" for that storied ad agency, now called simply Y&R. By the mid-2000s, Grandenetti was freelancing for, mostly, small Long Island agencies "I've been working from my office at home, which is kind of nice," he told Fears. "What they have me doing is almost like doing comic books; I'm doing television storyboards. What I do is panel sequences." He also did commissioned paintings for fans.

Aside from his daughter Jennifer, Grandenetti was survived by three older daughters, Deborah Grandenetti, Melodie Heath and Karen Pizzillo, and the youngest sibling, son Jannaro Grandenetti, as well as three sisters, Mary, Alda and Sylvia. A younger brother predeceased him. He was married for 37 years to Ali Jericiau Grandenetti until their divorce.

Frank Lovece, a feature writer for Newsday and a film critic for that newspaper and for Film Journal International, writes frequently on film, television, photography and comics. The author of several non-fiction books, including one about missing children, he wrote for Marvel, Dark Horse and Harris Comics from 1990 to 1996. For more: http://franklovece.com

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