Avengers Annual #10
Chris Claremont, Michael Golden and Armando Gil
Best known for the introduction of the popular X-Men character 'Rogue', this annual featured some of both Golden and Gils best work. When comic book fans think of Armando Gil they generally recall this issue. Sadly the poor printing quality of the final product meant that the colouring overpowered the line art at times and the entire story was better served with the high quality reprint in Marvel Visionaries: Chris Claremont and would clearly benefit from a printing of the art in it's original black and white line art format. A handful of pages are in the hands of collectors, many pages remain buried deep in private collections and are rarely seen by the general public. Below is a smattering of pages with Armando's own comments about the issue itself.
Contents © Copyright & ™ 2009 ACAB
Art © Copyright &™ 2009 Armando Gil And Michael Golden
The Avengers © Copyright & ™ 2009 Marvel Comics
I got to ink the Avengers Annual which was a lot of fun and Rubenstein kept bugging me to ink a page. Michael Golden didn't want him touching his stuff [laughter] but I gave him one page out of the book to ink. I don't know if the annual made my carrer because I didn't know what kind of effect any of the stuff I was doing was having because I was too close to the eye of the storm, if you want to use that cliché. For example I was at a copy centre in California a little while ago and wanted to make some copies and the guy said, "Man, I love your stuff, what's your name?" I said, "Armando," and he said, "Armando Gil?" I didn't know I had that kind of effect upon people.
I really think that Michael Golden needs to be credited for most of that look. The guy really put his heart and soul into the pencils and all I did was try to be honest with it. I followed one little theory that Rubenstein imparted me with, because I used to hang out at Neal Adam's Continuity studios, and he said, "An inker isn't supposed to overwhelm the artist, he's supposed to enhance the artist." In some cases where you get breakdowns then it's a different attitude. I just tried to stay as true as I could to Michael Golden's work which is why I think Michael Golden asked me a bunch of times to work on his stuff.
